Quotes from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“Vade Mecum

I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain. ”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore...
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle—
...too much to name, too much to think about.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“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.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“O Canada I have not forgotten you,
as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision
of a bookcase.
You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.
You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on
the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.
You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.
But not only that,
you are the two boys with pails walking along that road.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“The whole idea of it makes me feel
Like I’m coming down with something,
Something worse than any stomach ache
Or the headaches I get from reading in bad light –
A kind of measles of the spirit
A mumps of the psyche,
A disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
But that is because you have forgotten
The perfect simplicity of being one
And the beautiful complexity introduced by two
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit

At four I was an Arabian wizard
I could make myself invisible
By drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a solider, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
Watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
Against the side of my tree house,
And my bicycle never leaned against the garage
As it does today,
All the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
As I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imagry friends,
Time to turn the first big number.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“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.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

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