Iwas looking for an autumn poem, maybe a Thanksgiving poem, and this one landed in my lap. Only a mention of autumn but full of thanksgiving. Billy Collins’ poems do this thing. They point me toward the most ordinary moments, with rapt attention. The thing they do is, to my mind, the most daring of moves — they bypass the sense of writing a poem, or reading one, and simply say how it is, how we know it is, in our own lives. Yet what comes out is a poem after all.

How do I know it’s a poem? Because it celebrates that act of attention, which after all, is love. Because it makes metaphor to help me see better. Because it has no other function than to show me myself, how I can be when I fall in love with random things. Because it has condensed a whole world of concentrated attention into thes

See Full Page