September 27: "January in Paris," Long Walk, Fever Dreams

I went for a long walk this evening.  It was unseasonable warm, as it has been for the last few weeks.  There were tons of people out and about, hiking, bicycling, jogging, walking dogs.  As I passed Lake Bancroft, I stopped and gazed around me.

Everything was golden or gold-tinted, thanks to the setting sun and first gasps of autumn.  The soft waves, geese honking in the distance, fingers of long grass waving--it all made me want to sit down and write the final stanza to the poem around me.

Billy Collins finishes another poet's poem . . . 

January in Paris

by: Billy Collins

Poems are never completed—they are only abandoned.

— Paul Valéry

That winter I had nothing to do
but tend the kettle in my shuttered room
on the top floor of a pensione near a cemetery,

but I would sometimes descend the stairs,
unlock my bicycle, and pedal along the cold city streets
often turning from a wide boulevard
down a narrow side street
bearing the name of an obscure patriot.

I followed a few private rules,
never crossing a bridge without stopping
mid-point to lean my bike on the railing
and observe the flow of the river below
as I tried to better understand the French.

In my pale coat and my Basque cap
I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie
or sat up tall in the seat, arms folded,
and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air.

I would see beggars and street cleaners
in their bright uniforms, and sometimes
I would see the poems of Valéry,
the ones he never finished but abandoned,
wandering the streets of the city half-clothed.

Most of them needed only a final line
or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,
but whenever I approached,
they would retreat from their ashcan fires
into the shadows—thin specters of incompletion,

forsaken for so many long decades
how could they ever trust another man with a pen?

I came across the one I wanted to tell you about
sitting with a glass of rosé at a café table—
beautiful, emaciated, unfinished,
cruelly abandoned with a flick of panache

by Monsieur Paul Valéry himself,
big fish in the school of Symbolism
and for a time, president of the Committee of Arts and Letters
of the League of Nations if you please.

Never mind how I got her out of the café,
past the concierge and up the flights of stairs—
remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing.

And never mind the holding and the pressing.
It is enough to know that I moved my pen
in such a way as to bring her to completion,

a simple final stanza, which ended,
as this poem will, with the image
of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed,
her large eyes closed,
a painting of cows in a valley over her head,

and off to the side, me in a window seat
blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn.

Yes, these past couple weeks have been fever dreams--the last breaths of summer.  Anyone who's lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for any length of time realizes how brief the warm months are.  That's why the beaches of Lake Superior have recently been so packed with people getting their final doses of 80-degree evenings 

I am never ready for summer to end.  Collins starts his poem with a famous quote from Paul Valéry:  "Poems are never completed—they are only abandoned."  I think this applies to summer in the U.P., as well.  It never feels complete because autumn and winter assert themselves pretty quickly come September/October.  There's never a real coda to summer--a last line filled with sunlight and sweat and sand.  Instead, Yoopers go to bed one September or October night, and they wake up to a world transformed with white.

So, think of this post as my farewell-to-summer stanza.  Golden light.  Warm breeze.  A glassy, Bob Ross lake filled with happy little accidents of waves.  

And Saint Marty standing on the shore, breathing in the smell of leaf mold and marsh weeds.