A Good Balance

In earlier posts, I wrote about how Billy Collins was very accessible to non-poetry buffs, and how I thought that at times he was too accessible. This poem, “The Best Cigarette,” is one of his most well-known poems, and I think that it’s a good balance between clarity and insightfulness. Collins uses the “cigarette” as a metaphor for different seasons of his existence, and he connects the cigarette with other images and descriptive words—the locomotive, steam, vaporous, puffs, flame, lights, smoke, etc. This is not just a narrative poem where Collins describes events in a conversational tone, and I think that the poem draws in the reader with the highly descriptive (but concrete) language.


The Best Cigarette

There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.