The Love Song of J. Billy Collins
You are the diner in sawdust restaurants,
the other woman in one-night cheap hotels.
You are one of those women talking of Michelangelo
and Rembrandt and Picasso and Klee.
You are the woman who dares to eat a peach
or even mangoes and over-ripe bananas.
However, you are not a pair of ragged claws,
And, dear, you never scuttle.
Nor do you shimmy, slither or sashay.
And you are certainly not the confidant of Ezra Pound.
There is no way you could be the confidant of Ezra Pound.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of mandarin oranges and things poetical,
that I am not Prince Hamlet
or any other Great Dane you might know.
But I am the yellow smoke that glides along the street
and the patient etherized upon a table.
But don’t worry, I am not the diner in sawdust restaurants.
You are still the diner in the restaurant.
You will always be the diner in the restaurant.
Not to mention the sawdust on the floor and—somehow-- the cheap wine.
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