Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, filling in for David Kern, and today is Tuesday, August 18th.

Today's poem is by an American poet named Billy Collins, who was born in 1941, and Collins is one of the most well-known and influential poets writing in the contemporary landscape of

American letters today. He served as the U.S. Poet Laureate for two terms from 2001 to 2003,

and then he transitioned to being the New York State Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006.

His credentials are many, but I wanted to point out one particularly special honor for him in 2002,

while he was the U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins was asked by Congress to write a poem commemorating

the first anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

The reading was done in front of a joint session of Congress held outside of Washington, D.C., a high honor indeed, and it's a lovely poem.

But that's not the poem I'm going to read for you today

i'm going to read a poem called aristotle it's a long poem so i'll read it once and then offer a few

brief comments i think once is all we'll have time for aristotle this is the beginning.

Almost anything can happen.

This is where you find the creation of light,

a fish wriggling onto land,

the first word of paradise lost on an empty page.

Think of an egg, the letter A,

a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises.

This is the very beginning. The first person narrator introduces himself, tells us about his

lineage. The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings. Here, the climbers are studying a map or pulling on their long,

woolen socks. This is early on, years before the ark, dawn. The profile of an animal is being

smeared on the wall of a cave, and you have not yet learned to crawl. This is the opening, the gambit, a pawn moving forward an inch.

This is your first night with her, your first night without her.

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