Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
I have never been fishing on the Susquehannaor on any river for that matterto be perfectly honest.
Not in July or any monthhave I had the pleasure--if it is a pleasure--of fishing on the Susquehanna.
I am more likely to be foundin 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 sensationof fishing on the Susquehanna.
There is little doubtthat others have been fishingon the Susquehanna, rowing upstream in a wooden boat,sliding the oars under the waterthen raising them to drip in the light.
But the nearest I have ever come tofishing on the Susquehannawas one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia when I balanced a little egg of timein front of a paintingin 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, greenflat-bottom boatholding the thin whip of a pole.
That is something I am unlikelyever to do,
I remembersaying to myself and the person next to me.
Then I blinked and moved onto other American scenesof haystacks, water whitening over rocks, even one of a brown harewho seemed so wired with alertnessI imagined him springing right out of the frame.
One of Billy Collins' most critically acclaimed works, "Fishing on the Susquehanna in July" has been added to the preserved works of the United States Native American literary registry as being deemed a culturally significant poem.
Billy Collins
Other author posts
Consolation
How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboardand all the sudd...
The Trouble with Poetry
The Trouble with Poetry: A Poem of Billy The trouble with poetry,
Pinup
The murkiness of the local garage is not so densethat you cannot make out the calendar of pinupdrawings on the wall above a bench of tools Your ears are ringing with the sound ofthe mechanic hammering on your exhaust pipe,and as you look clos...
Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,they seem to say, I would bolt the d...