Dear Billy (if I may),

I am aware that you are not necessarily looking for an assistant but am nonetheless writing to apply for the position. These pinched times require a proactive approach, as I’m sure you understand, having been a poet before you were a famous poet. Now that you’re a famous poet and have so many books under your belt, I thought you might benefit from having an assistant. I gather you’ve got more ideas for poems than you have time to write, judging from the source of your inspiration, which appears to be everything that happens or doesn’t happen to you or me or any of us, including groundhogs. Maybe there are other things you’d like to be doing now. Maybe you would like to take your wife to Ireland or Rome or Bruges, those places she has suggested you put in your poems but maybe just wants you guys to visit. Maybe she’s tired of hanging around the house where the radio is always on and you always seem to be lying on the couch staring at the ceiling crack and listening to the dog breathe, not to mention flipping through Victoria’s Secret catalogues and wondering which room would be best for dying in. And then there was the night you made a model eclipse out of an orange, a marble, and an aspirin. That had to be a low point for her. You, yourself, said the horses in those photographs of nine horse heads she gave you for your birthday looked dead. Maybe she was trying to tell you something, like we need a vacation. Or maybe you could use the time freed up from having me around to write some inaccessible stuff for a change, a whole book of poems nobody understands. Whatever you need time for (maybe just listening to more jazz?), I could help. Here’s what I propose: I would draft poems and you would only have to put on the finishing touches, sort of like the arrangement the Old Masters had with their assistants. As per that tradition, I would not require credit, only payment. I am writing to you rather than to other emeritus poets laureate because I have determined that my skill set is most suited to working for you. I do not think writing Louise Gluck poems would be a good fit for me (I am not oracular enough) or Robert Pinsky poems, either (my knowledge of Old English is scant), whereas I think my sensibilities make me entirely suited and my life experiences qualify me uniquely to write Billy Collins poems. For one thing, I am currently unemployed; for another, as little happens to me as appears to happen to you, so there would be no danger of my addressing elevated subjects. I do not have a ceiling crack to stare up at but I do have a mold. Surely as much can be made out of mold as can be made out of cracks in the ceiling. I, too, like to loaf around the house, wine glass in hand, listening to the radio and admiring my dog, who happens, these days, to be wearing one of those big plastic collars to keep him from worrying the little wound a cyst removal left. He looks both farcical and tragical, like an Elizabethan jester. This has Billy Collins poem potential, don’t you think, being funny/sad? Dust is also plentiful here and I do not foresee any difficulty discerning shapes in it. I could draft a series of dust poems, which I think would take your propensity for writing about the insignificant and the non-event to its logical end. Poems about the shape of dust would surely be the very antithesis of poems about the water clock in Bruges I think it was your wife suggested you write about and you pooh-poohed in favor of more commonplace subjects. (What is a water clock, anyway? Is not my ignorance a kind of qualification for the position?!) After reading so many of them, lately, I see Billy Collins poems everywhere in the day’s flotsam and jetsam. Remember when you found that stray chess piece in the park and made a poem out of it? I’m always coming across trash on my walks and am sure I could draft at least a Billy Collins poem a day about that. I see toothpaste falling off the brush: I see a potential Billy Collins poem. I hear the weather report on the radio: I hear a potential Billy Collins poem, maybe one that begins by occasioning laughter and ends by bringing down the corners of the reader’s mouth and dilating her pupils, the better to see in the dark room she’s been nudged into unawares. I don’t know how you’ve managed so long without an assistant, since it’s been your habit to make poems out of nothing and nothing, as we all know, is everywhere. I note John Updike said in a blurb that your poems are “more serious than they seem.” Well, I am confident I could draft poems you could put your name on that would not seem serious. Thank you, in advance, for considering me for the position.

Kirsten Giebutowski got an enormous kick out of Picnic, Lightning and Nine Horses, which were her belated introduction to Billy Collins and which she read while working at a farm stand last summer. In fact, she was so high on the experience of reading those two books while at the farm stand that she wrote about that, too, for Coudal Partners' Field Tested Books project (www.coudal.com/ftb). This piece also bears some relation to a collage she assembled called "Things I Have Written in Cover Letters" that appears in McSweeney's Internet Tendency.