The Best Cigarette

tags: The Best Cigarette, poetry, Billy Collins, streaming video

April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day, this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me). For this first poem of the month, I found this gem by Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate and one of America's best-selling poets. It is a streaming video where the poet reads his own poem in his luscious voice, and it is wonderfully animated by David Vaio of FAD [1:42]

The Best Cigarette

There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

-- Billy Collins, Billy Collins Live: A Performance at the Peter Norton Symphony Space (Random House Audio; 2005).