When Billy Collins Falls For Me

He’s had one too many cups of

coffee, black, and reads my poem

with a vibration in his hand.

He wants more. To know how

a woman can conceive of her

chest as an air-filled cavity,

her breasts balloons

that will carry her into published pages

and her words into the mouths

of children not yet born.

He searches his books, papers,

telephones on the land-line

to an editor he knew in the mid-west

once in the 1970s. Where else would women

have toes that point skyward

and painted in glitter?

He finds my address, an old one,

and sends letters filled with verbs

and feathers. The man who receives them

wonders who this poet is, obsessed with the smell

of poltergeists, who omits a return address.