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I couldn’t let poetry month end without tossing one more out onto the blog. I thought about Emily Dickinson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Elizabeth Bishop. All of them are favorites, and well worth looking into if you’re not familiar with their work. But in the end, I couldn’t get away from posting another Billy Collins favorite The Best Cigarette.

Collins is now an ex-smoker, but I think this poem captures not only what smoking writers find so appealing about the combination of addictions; it also feels to me like a great post-modern look upon the conflicts of industry and personal freedom that poets like Blake and Dickinson wrote so eloquently and emotionally about.

The first stanza always reminds me of the Talking Heads’ video for Burning Down the House.

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.

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