"Litany" by Billy Collins:
You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine…
-Jacques CrickillonYou are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.
Continued here. Sarah S deconstructs the poem:
Just like Shakespeare, Collins takes a standard poetic trick (in this case, the comparison of the beloved to an ordinary object which then becomes weighted with symbolism and import…unless you’ve seen it done as often as Collins has, in which case it just gets silly, which is why he wrote the poem) and then refuses to engage in that kind of poetic silliness. Collins pushes it one step further by resigning himself to the silliness he’s just criticized, however. … One of the best ways to write a love poem, it turns out, is to insist that this is not what you are doing. And then to do it anyway.
The Dish 