Picnic Lightning
By:
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- Synopsis
- "Bonsai All it takes is one to throw a room completely out of whack. Over by the window it looks hundreds of yards away, a lone stark gesture of wood on the distant cliff of a table. Up close, it draws you in, cuts everything down to its size. Look at it from the doorway, and the world dilates and bloats. The button lying next to it is now a pearl wheel, the book of matches is a raft, and the coffee cup a cistern to catch the same rain that moistens its small plot of dark, mossy earth. For it even carries its own weather, leaning away from a fierce wind that somehow blows through the calm tropics of this room. The way it bends inland at the elbow makes me want to inch my way to the very top of its spiky greenery, hold onto for dear life and watch the sea storm rage, hoping for a tiny whale to appear. I want to see her plunging forward through the troughs, tunneling under the foam and spindrift on her annual, thousand-mile journey. Splitting Wood Frost covered this decades ago, and frost will cover it again tonight, the leafy disarray of this woodland now thinned down to half its trees, but this morning I stand here sweating in a thin shirt as I split a stack of ash logs into firewood with two wedges, an ax, and a blue-headed maul. The pleasures here are well known: the feet planted wide, the silent unstoppable flow of the downswing, the coordination that is called hand-eye, because the hand achieves whatever the concupiscent eye desires when it longs for a certain spot, which, in this case, is the slightest fissure visible at one end of the log where the thin, insinuating edge of the blade can gain entry, where the shape of its will can be done. ..."
- Copyright:
- 1998
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Excellent
- Book Size:
- 1 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822940661
- Publisher:
- N/A
- Date of Addition:
- 05/13/05
- Copyrighted By:
- Billy Collins
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Poetry, Literature and Fiction
- Submitted By:
- Dan Burke
- Proofread By:
- Lena
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.