Poem For Billy Collins

You are the soup and the spoon. You are the moist, warm vapor of tarragon rising from the bowl, you are the wooden bowl. You are that same vapor morphed into the morning mist that flags across the tops of hemlock and pine on its journey toward an evening sky so perfectly clouded and colored it could be a painting. You are that sky at dusk. You are the canvas that caught the silhouette of a tardy mourning dove racing home. And I am that mourning dove lost in reverie while foraging beneath a Mock Orange. I am the Mock Orange. I am the perfume lifting out of the center of its creamy, white petals— pursed like a pouting mouth. I am the hunger. I am the mouth that will not hesitate to open for the offered spoon of soup. By: Evelyn Augusto