I forget who claimed he loved books, he just didn’t like reading them. I feel the same way about chess. And bridge. I used to have my poetry students read the play-by-play annotations in the New York Times bridge column. We had no idea what they meant, but we could tell some kind of struggle was going on. Akin to some poems. I do like chess as a subject or metaphor. In another poem, I wrote about finding a lost chess piece in a park and imagining that a salt shaker had taken its place on the board.
Some Pieces
The knight turns his horse
with invisible reins.
The bishop lifts his robes
and slides across the board.
That the castle budges
at all is impressive.
The unhurried pawn
moves an inch at a time
toward the square
of its sudden removal,
while the king and queen
quietly discuss the ending.
Billy Collins served as a two-term U.S. Poet Laureate (2001–03) and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book of poems is Water, Water (Random House, 2024), and forthcoming later this year is Dog Show, a collection of his poems about dogs, with watercolors by Pamela Sztybel. “Some Pieces” is a new poem written for Winter Park Magazine.