Soundbytes 9.18
The River
I HAVE A CIGAR BOX OF OLD FAMILY PHOTOS, creased and curled and annotated in pencil on the backs: Joni, 1958, or Alice in John’s waders, 1939. Aunts, uncles, great-uncles, grandparents, cousins—it was a big family, mostly in Dayton, Ohio, and mostly long passed on to that great photo album in the sky, with the sole exceptions of my brother and sister and me, still grimacing for the camera.
With more birthdays behind me now than birthdays coming up, I’ve naturally been thinking a bit about what image I’d like to represent me when I too have forgotten my lines for the last time and slunk offstage. But since we can be any age at all once we’re no longer around to scowl and cringe for merciless driver’s license photos snapped by smug 20-year-olds, I feel perfectly entitled to get the jump on it and go with a version I like—for instance one of my favorites, from 1956.
Pulling out of the station or pulling in, I can’t remember. Or possibly, since to my knowledge we never took a train anywhere except around a loop at Lakeside Amusement Park, we had just hopped onto the train steps for a quick photo op. Say cheese. Cheeeeese.
(My old man rarely appears in snapshots of the time. He was the one squinting into the lens of his old Argus. The photographer exists only in the eyes of his mugging subjects.)
Or another favorite of mine, showing that gung-ho athleticism that would eventually win me the position of Recording Secretary of the Oakwood Junior High School Art Club.
That helmet, incidentally, was made of cardboard and felt, about as protective as your typical Wheaties box. Luckily it never had to withstand an actual tackle, although it once deflected a pretty vicious broom handle blow wielded by my neighbor Marilyn Ryan after I attempted an ambitious scoop of several jacks and swept them all into the hedge. Lucky I was helmeted at the time.
I have a few more recent possibilities of suitable gravitas, for instance one of me attempting to look poetic for a book-cover that didn’t happen
But really, I think my enduring posture in this life when all is said and done—and death is a pretty good working definition, in my view, of said and done—ought to be quite simply gratitude: gratitude for my incredible and usually undeserved good fortune, gratitude for all the flubs and fumbles that felt like miserable luck at the time but led eventually to my usual good fortune, gratitude even for this opportunity to re-write my own story without much risk of contradiction.
Therefore, here’s my thank-you to the sky, on the shore of Great Star Lake, circa 1956.
The River [click to play]
I follow this old river where it takes me Where it takes me Won’t you come too. Like leaves fallen on the water Hey you Won’t you come too I follow down these days upon the river That old river Won’t you come too Days of sun and shadow down the river Hey you Won’t you come too We are a moment of color on the water We are feathers forgotten how to fly Reds and golds and browns Fallen down And gone, drifting on So I follow this old river where it takes me Where it takes me Won’t you come too. Like leaves blown upon the water Hey you Won’t you come too We are a moment of color on the water We are feathers forgotten how to fly Reds and golds and browns Fallen down And gone, drifting on, me and you Hey you Won’t you come too Hey you Won’t you come too
Philip Singer’s first chapbook, Natives (Chowder Press, Madison, WI) was followed by See Rock City (Gallimaufry Press, Bethesda, MD), poems first published in North American Review, Poetry Magazine, Swanee Review, Yale Review, Southern Poetry Review and other publications too obscure for even the author to remember. He also co-edited the regrettably short-lived New River Review (Radford, Virginia), with poet Charles L. Hayes, and Poetryfish (Norwich, Vermont), an online journal of poetry and fiction. Sun Tea, a serialized memoir first published here on Substack, appeared in 2022, with a couple of afterwords (Hey, kids, wait up!) in the years since.
Singer lives in Virginia with his wife Briah and their little gray wonder-dog, Maisie.