Billy Collins was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. He has seven collections of poetry and is now Poet Laureate of New York State. You can find this poem in his collection, The Trouble with Poetry.
The Long Day
In the morning I ate a banana
like a young ape
and worked on a poem called “Nocturne.”
In the afternoon I opened the mail
with a short kitchen knife,
and when dusk began to fall
I took off my clothes,
put on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”
and soaked in a claw-footed bathtub.
I closed my eyes and thought
about the alphabet,
the letters filing out of the halls of kindergarten
to become literature.
If the British call z zed,
I wondered, why not call b bed and d dead?
And why does z, which looks like
the fastest letter, come at the very end?
unless they are all moving east
when we are facing north in our chairs.
It was then that I heard
a clap of thunder and the dog’s bark,
and the claw-footed bathtub
took one step forward,
or was it backward
I had to ask
as I turned
to reach for a faraway towel.
Billy Collins