Billy Collins

It was Adolphe Sax, remember, not Saxo Grammaticus, who gets the ovation. And by the time he had brought all the components together–the serpentine shape, the single reed, the fit of the fingers, the upward tilt of the golden bell– it was already 1842, and one gets the feeling that it was also very late at night. There is something nocturnal about the sound, something literally horny, as some may have noticed on that historic date when the first odd notes wobbled out of his studio into the small, darkened town, summoning the insomniacs (who were up waiting for the invention of jazz) to their windows, but leaving the sleepers undisturbed, evening deepening and warming the waters of their dreams. For this is not the valved instrument of waking, more the smoky voice of longing and loss, the porpoise cry of the subconscious. No one would ever think of blowing reveille on a tenor without irony. The men would only lie in their metal bunks, fingers twined behind their heads, afloat on pools of memory and desire. And when the time has come to rouse the dead, you will not see Gabriel clipping an alto around his numinous neck. An angel playing the world’s last song on a glistening saxophone might be enough to lift them back into the light of earth, but really no further. Once resurrected, they would only lie down in the long cemetery grass or lean alone against a lugubrious yew and let the music do the ascending– curling snakes charmed from their baskets– while they wait for the shrill trumpet solo, that will blow them all to kingdom come.

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

There is no noisier place than the suburbs, someone once said to me as we were walking along a fairway, and every day is delighted to offer fresh evidence: the chainsaw, the leaf-blower blowing one leaf around an enormous house with columns, on Mondays and Thursdays the garbage truck equipped with air brakes, reverse beeper, and merciless grinder. There’s dogs, hammers, backhoes or serious earthmovers if today is not your day. How can the birds get a peep or a chirp in edgewise, I would like to know? But this morning is different, only a soft clicking sound and the low talk of two workmen working on the house next door, laying tile I am guessing. Otherwise, all quiet for a change, just the clicking of tiles being handled and their talking back and forth in Spanish then one of them asking in English “What was her name?” and the silence of the other.

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna or on any river for that matter to be perfectly honest. Not in July or any month have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure— of fishing on the Susquehanna. I am more likely to be found in a quiet room like this one— a painting of a woman on the wall, a bowl of tangerines on the table— trying to manufacture the sensation of fishing on the Susquehanna. There is little doubt that others have been fishing on the Susquehanna, rowing upstream in a wooden boat, sliding the oars under the water then raising them to drip in the light. But the nearest I have ever come to fishing on the Susquehanna was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia when I balanced a little egg of time in front of a painting in which that river curled around a bend under a blue cloud-ruffled sky, dense trees along the banks, and a fellow with a red bandanna sitting in a small, green flat-bottom boat holding the thin whip of a pole. That is something I am unlikely ever to do, I remember saying to myself and the person next to me. Then I blinked and moved on to other American scenes of haystacks, water whitening over rocks, even one of a brown hare who seemed so wired with alertness I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

I pour a coating of salt on the table and make a circle in it with my finger. This is the cycle of life I say to no one. This is the wheel of fortune, the Arctic Circle. This is the ring of Kerry and the white rose of Tralee I say to the ghosts of my family, the dead fathers, the aunt who drowned, my unborn brothers and sisters, my unborn children. This is the sun with its glittering spokes and the bitter moon. This is the absolute circle of geometry I say to the crack in the wall, to the birds who cross the window. This is the wheel I just invented to roll through the rest of my life I say touching my finger to my tongue.

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance displaying their capital letters like license plates. Truth cantering on a powerful horse, Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils. Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat, Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended, Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall, Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm. They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes. Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator. Valor lies in bed listening to the rain. Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood, and all their props are locked away in a warehouse, hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles. Even if you called them back, there are no places left for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss. The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair. Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies and next to it black binoculars and a money clip, exactly the kind of thing we now prefer, objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case, themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow, an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray. As for the others, the great ideas on horseback and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns, it looks as though they have traveled down that road you see on the final page of storybooks, the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago as I waited for my eggs and toast, I opened the Tribune only to discover that I was the same age as Cheerios. Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios for today, the newspaper announced, was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year. Already I could hear them whispering behind my stooped and threadbare back, Why that dude’s older than Cheerios

You see them on porches and on lawns down by the lakeside, usually arranged in pairs implying a couple who might sit there and look out at the water or the big shade trees. The trouble is you never see anyone sitting in these forlorn chairs though at one time it must have seemed a good place to stop and do nothing for a while. Sometimes there is a little table between the chairs where no one is resting a glass or placing a book facedown. It might be none of my business, but it might be a good idea one day for everyone who placed those vacant chairs on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them for the sake of remembering whatever it was they thought deserved to be viewed from two chairs side by side with a table in between. The clouds are high and massive that day. The woman looks up from her book. The man takes a sip of his drink. Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking, the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird then another, cries of joy or warning— it passes the time to wonder which.

I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark that I cut from a tree with a penknife. There is no other way to express adequately the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility that hands you the horizon on a platter. I am also writing this in a wooden canoe, a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching, resting the birch bark against my knees. I can feel the sun’s hands on my bare back, but I am thinking of winter, snow piled up in all the provinces and the solemnity of the long grain-ships that pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound. O Canada, as the anthem goes, scene of my boyhood summers, you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table, you are the dove-soft train whistle in the night, you are the empty chair at the end of an empty dock. You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage: Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery, So You’re Going to Paris! by Clara E. Laughlin, and Peril Over the Airport, one of the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series by Helen Wills whom some will remember as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories. What has become of the languorous girls who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse, Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse,