5/30/13

Last night I came across Billy Collins's "Winter Syntax" for the first time. It begins,

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.
All of these moments are blazing with silence.

The complete poem can be found here.