for Billy Collins

These happy, stable poets
write spotless unblemished
verses about classical art
& Biblical myth in stanzas
orderly & efficient, laid
out like sets of equidistant
beads on an abacus,
their words enlightening
& enticing, each poem a one-
page revelation of penetrative
thought they inscribed
leisurely in their rambling
townhouse sequestered on a quiet
lane just off campus
at the enviable & established
liberal arts college
(hotbed of radicalism & creative
leaps forwards)
where they’ve been teaching
for decades, now the fancy-
name Chair of some such
literary discipline, virtual
legend among poetic educators,
published in The New Yorker
(several times), The Paris Review
(regularly) & Plowshares
(since its inception), author
of 8 books running under
that Random House imprint
(you know the one) & previous
poet laureate of the greater Northeast.

Meanwhile, I sit in my rented
Bangkok condo like a fish out
of water, staring at the staid
white walls & the faux-natural
courtyard next to tastefully-
screened swimming pool outside,
pulling words from my blood
like recalcitrant teeth to pen
unimaginative & pedestrian
lines with pleasant-
sounding alliterative effects & Writing-
101 enjambment, stuff nobody
will ever read (except myself &
all my phantom friends),
bitter but not alone & surely
unsuccessful by comparison
to thee, great bard of the 1980s
& 90s, perhaps into the 20-aughts
(but things were different then,
            weren’t they?),
and yet still (I hate to admit
it) I love your work
and whenever I read one
of your lines in the collection
I purchased on a whim,
I get all soft
inside, get goosebumps
(of the mental kind)
even, as you rekindle within
the wonder, that only-could-
be-that-perspective of poetry
which shows us worlds as vas
as angels on the head
of a pin, with language so disarmingly
simple & deep it creates
vivid unalterable pictures
in your head of an insomniac’s
dream of The Flood
or the personification of Constancy
sitting alone in a dusty
warehouse in our unhallowed
day & age; you make
me want to write more
in the way you do,
and after 20+ years of self-
suppression, struggle
& failure that’s something.

Christopher Heise was born in the suburbs of the northeastern US and later studied writing at a tiny university there. For the last decade-plus he’s lived and worked abroad, including in Germany, India and Taiwan, where he’s performed as a festival clown, taught English to refugees and edited stock reports. Many of his poems reflect his ‘nomadic’ lifestyle.