I feel that I'm trying to be well mannered, at least in the beginning of the poem. I was talking about these coordinates, knowing where you are and when you are: it's Wednesday and I'm looking out at this lawn, or something common like that. I like the poem to get a little ahead of me and a little ahead of the reader, but I'm incapable of engineering any kind of poetic travel to some unknown or interesting place if I don't have a starting place. That's why I always tend to begin a poem with something fairly clear or a piece of common knowledge, like "Bar Time" or the song "Three Blind Mice," something we all know, some little common ground that becomes the grounding wire.    - Billy Collins (Powells.com)