Billy Collins - Winter Syntax lyrics

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. The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning outside a d**tore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon in a corner of the couch. Bare branches in winter are a form of writing. The unclothed body is autobiography. Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun. But the traveler persists in his misery, struggling all night through the deepening snow, leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints on the white hills and the white floors of valleys, a message for field mice and pa**ing crows. At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke rising from your chimney, and when he stands before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost, a smile will appear in the beard of icicles, and the man will express a complete thought.