This one's for you, Billy

I confess to a crush on Billy Collins.  For those who don't know (don't feel bad, he's a poet and thus doesn't fall in the same category of fame as, say, Ryan Gosling) he is an American poet.  In fact he was America's Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, and yes, he's currently alive and writing.  I wrote the following after reading his book Questions About Angels about fifteen times in a row.  (Obsess much?)  He'd probably tear it apart, but he'll never read it and so I have nothing to fear.

Excavation

At its core, poetry

is anthropology.

You know the words are there

beneath layers of earth

or psyche, and all that remains

is to dig.

Some days it's all effort and no payoff:

you haul in the machines to drag the words

to the surface, and rearrange them into 

something resembling a boneyard.

Their hollow skulls stare

up out of the page, looking lost

as if their subterranean forms could only survive

buried deep in the mad dreams they came from.

Other poems are light as loam

just beneath the crust, cradled

in the roots of trees--

undamaged, their perfect skeletons

ready for display.