A Poem for a Thursday #137

I haven’t featured a Billy Collins poem in a while. I don’t think I have read one I haven’t liked. I love the way his poems are so conversational. They sound as if a friend is talking to you about something you have always thought but haven’t known how to put into words. The reader can easily imagine he is sitting on your front porch chatting to you in a leisurely manner over a frosted glass of lemonade.

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-bottomed boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.

Then I blinked and move 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.

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
Billy Collins