Author: Billy Collins
Quotes of Author: Billy Collins
My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,weekdays, particularly Wednesday. This is how I go about it:I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pileas if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of onlya white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea. Then I remove my flesh and hand it over a chair.I slide if off my bones like a silken garment. I do this so that what I write will be pure, Completely rinsed of the carnal,uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body. Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange themOn a small table near the window.I do not want to hear their ancient rhythmswhen I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter. I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.In this condition I write extraordinary love poemsmost of them exploiting the connection between sexand death.I am concentration itself: I exist in a universewhere there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.After a spell of this I remove my penis too.Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.Now I write only about death, most classical of themesin language light as the air between my ribs.Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.I replace my organs and slip back into my fleshand clothes. Then I back the car out of the garageand speed through woods on winding country roads It was getting late in the year, the sky had been low and overcast for days, and I was drinking tea in a glassy room with a woman without children, a gate through which no one had entered the world. She was turning the pages of an expensive book on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea, a book of colorful paintings- a landscape, a portrait, a still life, a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the table. Men had entered there but no girl or boy had come out, I was thinking oddly as she stopped at a page of clouds aloft in a pale sky, tinged with red and gold. This one is my favorite, she said, even though it was only a detail, a corner of a larger painting which she had never seen. Nor did she want to see the countryside below or the portrayal of some myth in order for the billowing clouds to seem complete. This was enough, this fraction of the whole, just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough now that the light was growing dim, as was she enough, perfectly by herself somewhere in the enormous mural of the world. book-quotefeminismwomenwomanIn the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok you would never see him doing such a thing,tossing the dry snow over the mountainof his bare, round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot,a model of concentration.Sitting is more his speed, if that is the wordfor what he does, or does not do.Even the season is wrong for him.In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid?Is this not implied by his serene expression, that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?But here we are, working our way down the driveway.one shovelful at a time. We toss the light powder into the clean air.We feel the cold most on our faces.And with every heave we disappearand become lost to each otherin these sudden clouds of our own making, these fountain-bursts of snow. This is so much better than a sermon in church,I say out loud, bud Buddha keeps on shoveling.This is the true religion, the religion of snow,and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,I say, but he is too busy to hear meHe has thrown himself into shoveling snowas if it were the purpose of existence, as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear drivewayyou could back the car down easilyand drive off into the vanities of the worldwith a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.All morning long we work side by side, me with my commentaryand he is inside the generous pocket of his silence, until the house is nearly noonand the snow is piled high all around us;then, I hear him speak.After this, he asks, can we go inside and play cards?Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milkand bring cups of hot chlorate to the tablewhile you shuffle the deck, and our boots stand dripping by the door.Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyesand leaning for a moment on his shovelbefore he drives the fun blade againdeep into the glittering white snow. book-quote
