Sailing Alone Around the Room

by Billy Collins

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him. There are easier ways of making sense, the connoisseurship of gesture, for example. You hold a girl’s face in your hands like a vase. You lift a gun from the glove compartment and toss it out the window into the desert heat. These cool moments are blazing with silence.

Bare branches in winter are a form of writing. The unclothed body is autobiography.

Advice to Writers Even if it keeps you up all night, wash down the walls and scrub the floor of your study before composing a syllable. Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way. Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge.

“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

and every night the body curls around itself and listens for the soft bells of sleep.