Free Lunch--Poem, Billy Collins, "The Hunt" & "Gone"

Somewhere in the rolling hills and farm country
that lie beyond speech
Noah Webster and his assistants are moving
across the landscape tracking down a new word.

It is a small noun about the size of a mouse
and one that will be seldom used by anyone,
like a synonym for isthmus,
but they are pursuing the creature zealously

as if it were the verb to be,
swinging their sticks and calling our to one another
as they wade through a field of waist-high barley.

Issue 18 Spring 1997

Gone

Gone is Lord Nelson's arm
and gone is the head of Sir Walter Raleigh
which his wife used to carry around in a satchel.

Gone is my hair
and the whole of Amelia Earhart
in the wash of her silver propeller.

And now you are gone,
gone out the door with a suitcase
and over the hill in your car.

You and Homer's eyesight.
You and the children of Hamlin.
Gone like a coin through a grate

or Byron's journals.
Real gone like bebop.
The gone that leaves a zero in the here.

All gone, as we say to children.
All gone,
holding up our empty hands.