02/19/2024
The Hudson In November
I went up river to find myself again,
With trees and water,
The cackling at dusk,
The crackle of fires. In the hills,
Spirits roam and never light,
Old friends, the lovely girl
Who danced in my arms
One month in mid-winter spring,
The whole thing, now, a damp log,
Rolling down Kuerner’s Hill
Like soft colored fog.
I felt her hands on my shoulders.
I am older. She is older. Yet she is
Young, as young as yesterday,
And I am still that spreading boy, so full
Of whatever sparkles the edge of my eyes.
I was ageless then, gifted, almost newborn,
With weight, the sorry wisdom of words,
Wisdom, yes, even then, sweating from my wide brow,
Where I hid water under eyebrows,
Flicking like small, unrepentant dogs.
So long I have carried those words,
Words I speak, relentless as a patient
Who made rough art of his threat to leave,
Who cannot censor his disease,
Deemed wordy, foolish, run-on and old,
My words make rough art, like Mystic and the sea,
Saying what they cannot see,
A girl who lives by the Sound,
Where there is no sound.
I did not waste them entirely,
These words, I mean.
Others read them,
And they limned the silhouettes
Of companions, enemies, fruited farms,
Growing mad in sixty summer fields,
Born in betrayal, turning tired ground
To furrows dark and brown.
In my heart she is mine, still,
Nothing if not a muse,
Though no one would agree.
The blue garment, I painted,
As rare as lapis lazuli,
Purchased as powder in tiny jars,
Then ground with water and binders,
To make the paint Angelico saved
To paint the outer robe of his Virgin.
The paint Vermeer saved for a shawl.
The paint I saved for her moods
(And others did the same,
Without the noise or billboards selling Christ,
Being gifted in the ways of life),
Gifted as I was in the ways of v***rs,
Chimeras, and the comfort that comes
On Saturdays, after a feast when family
Goes its own way, and
There's no one left to love.
On that field of freedom,
Fraudulent as a stage with flats.
I could not find myself
With the click and tickle of leaves
Warning their mothers, the trees,
About the snow before the snow falls.
Two stars flicker in the deep doesn't-matter,
Calling through unseen dark matter,
Seeking constellations, mirrors, or reasons why.
One settles for gatherings of understudies
A cast of thousands, milky like a fog.
The other has children who sleep and dream of two stars,
Brilliant as life, until the brush of one hand,
So lightly, on the shoulder.
