September 6: "Monday," Flattened, Calumet

First things first:  I do not feel quite so flattened today.  My nose isn't running as much.  My head doesn't feel like an overinflated tire.  I don't think I have a fever anymore, and my cough is present but not quite so front page news.  It's tucked in the classifieds now.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm on the mend, just in time for a very busy weekend.

Billy Collins talks about the antithesis of Friday . . . 

Monday

by: Billy Collins

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth–
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see–
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlight of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare at the cracked birdbath
or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.

Just think–
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman’s heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

Currently, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Calumet, Michigan.  I have the heat blasting, and Duke Ellington is swinging in my headphones.  I'm going to be performing in a show tomorrow night--The Read Jacket Jamboree.  My voice has been coming and going most of the day.  Right now, it's gone.

And I'm doing just what the poet in Collins' poem is doing:  I'm at my window.  The parking lot is dark, dark, dark.  There's no moon visible.  The only illumination is a streetlight creating a bright pool on the asphalt.  

I need to get to sleep.  It's going to be a busy day of writing and rehearsing and performing tomorrow.  By this time tomorrow night, I will be completely exhausted.  Or dead.  

If Saint Marty does die, please have Wendell Berry read "The Peace of Wild Things" at his funeral.