To My Twenty-Five-Year-Old Self

Billy Collins, have you any

Idea how important

You were to my twenty-five-year-

Old self? You weren’t

Poet laureate yet, you

Were just a teacher I had

In Ireland. You were

Expansive and you

Believed in me.

I felt like a real poet

With you for the first

Time even though we

Argued about feminism

And things that mattered.

I was just at that cusp

Of being someone who wanted

So desperately to write,

Tipping over into becoming a writer.

I was fighting it. I didn’t know

How to be except angry.

I was frightened. What if I

Could be good? What if

I would never be good?

Would your attention

Be all I’d ever really have

Of poetry? How could I know?

And so I was angry at you.

And between the lesbian

Love I’d left in New York

Who, I’m grateful, convinced

Me to buy contact lenses

So I could see the green

Hills, and the British physicist

I’d end up in bed with

Before I’d left Ireland,

There was something pure

And aboveboard, not teacherly

But generous, and lovely

And incomplete and no

One thing. I won’t forget it:

The way you laughed

At some mean joke, at some

Ugly truth, into the wind

So it blew back into our happy,

Stupid faces on a ferry made me understand,

This is love the way poets know it.