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.
