The Effort

by Billy Collins

Would anyone care to join me

in flicking a few pebbles in the direction

of teachers who are fond of asking the question:

"What is the poet trying to say?"

as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson

had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts-

inarticulate wretches that they were,

biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue

Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell

and the rest could only try and fail,

but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class

here at Springfield High will succeed

with the help of these study questions

in saying what the poor poet could not,

and we will get all this done before

that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.

Tonight, however, I am the one trying

to say what it is this absence means,

the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.

The image of this vase of cut flowers,

not from our garden, is no help.

And the same goes for the single plate,

the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face

against these new windows- the drizzle and the

  morning frost.

So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,

who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,

and her students- a few with their hands up,

others slouching with their caps on backwards-

to figure out what it is I am trying to say

about this place where I find myself

and to do it before the noon bell rings

and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.

from

Ballistics

Billy Collins

2008