People sometimes ask me why I write. Because, I tell them, I don't golf. This gives me two or three days a week with a few hours in them in which to read or write. It's all the same thing to me, reading and writing, twins of the one conversation. And I don't drink. I did, of course, and plenty of it, but had to quit for the usual reasons. It got to where I was spilling so much of it. This gave me two or three nights a week - five or six the way I was doing it at the end - with a few hours in them when things weren't blurry. With some of those hours I would read or write. And I am married to an Italian woman with some French sensibilities and five brothers, so I am home most nights and when I'm not, I call.
I sleep well, rise early and since I don't do aerobics or day trading, I read or write a few hours each morning. Then I take a walk. Out there on Shanks's mare, I think about what I'm reading or writing, which is one of the things I really like - it's portable. All you need is a little peace and quiet and the words will come to you - your own or the others, your own voice or the voice of God. Perspiration, inspiration. It feels like a gift. Years ago I was watching a woman undressing. The room was lit only by the light of the moon coming through an easterly window. Everything about this moment was careless and beautiful except for the sound of a sick boy in the next room coughing and croupy, unable to sleep. He had his medicine. The Vapo-rub and steam were bubbling away. I was drowsing with the sounds and darkening images, half dreaming of Venice, the Lido and the Zattere, the tall windows of a room I stayed in once, awash in moonlight and shadows, longing for the woman I loved madly then. It was that sweet moment between wake and sleep when the dream has only a foot in the door that the day and its duties have left ajar.
I wanted always to remember that sweetness, that moment, and knew I could not rise to write the details down - the sick child, the woman's beauty, the moonlight, the steam bubbling, the balance between the dream and duty, between the romance and the ordinary times - because the slumber was tightening around me. And I was searching for a word, one word that I could keep and remember till the morning; one word only: a key, a password by which I could return to this moment just long enough to make a poem, a purse made of words to keep the treasure of it in.
And I was fading quickly, my eyes were closed, my last bit of consciousness was clinging to words, then bits of words and finally only bits of noises, the woman beside me, the boy's laboured but even breathing, the bubbling of the vaporiser which became in my dream the vaporetti idling in the Grand Canal, because it was the key - vaporetti - the password, the outright gift of sound whose bubbling and whose syllables sound near enough the same as the sound of the vaporiser in the next room that let me traffic back and forth at will between the bedroom in Michigan and the bedroom in Venice and the moonlight and the beauty and the moment awash in ivory and shimmering images. I slept with the word. I woke with it. I rose and wrote the poem down. The women are gone. The boy is grown. The poem sits on the shelf in a book. I come and go to Venice as I please. The language is alive and well.
Thomas Lynch is the author of three books of poems, most recently Still Life in Milford. His collection of essays, The Under- taking, won the American Book Award. A second collection of essays, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, is forthcoming from Jonathan Cape. He lives in Milford, Michigan and in Moveen, West Clare.