Birds on A Wire

If John Updike wrote as many as 60 books, piles of essays, cricital reviews, commentary and Talk of the Town columns, then he used a lot of words, and quite truthfully, I then didn't read a great deal of them. But the words I did read I still savor.

I first became aware of things he wrote in the 1960s when I would pore over The New Yorker. I became aware first of his poems. I liked light verse, and I liked what he wrote. Whatever I read in the magazine lead me to buy a book of his poems. I no longer have the book, or even any of his poems, but I have the memory of something he wrote.

He compared birds on a wire to punctuation marks in a sentence. Something about their bodies and black dots. I now will try and flesh that poem out. To this day, whenever I look up and see birds on a wire, I think of a sentence. I think of him.

Whenever I see a pair of ratty sneakers draped over the wires I don't know what to think. He didn't write about it.

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