HUDSON POEMS

"a sweet serenity, a holy joy of a peculiar kind, untasted in my bosom until then." -- Jarena Lee

1.

The Hudson freezes, the chemicals loosen
The taut thoughts torture internal solution
The Hudson freezes up north, in the summer,
On the side lines, in the ice stems: thoughts go under

The Hudson thaws as you southerly wander
Loosens the ice, tortures the wonder
The Hudson freezes and thaws how fast you are tending

To circle the stars,
observe the clear freighters
That hover in fog

Or lighten the sheer
drift of land and water
extending nothing stems out
whether the river is bending and tending
or not

Upending the starshine
No circles or squares,
a perfect rectangle, a star-thought that shares
Itself with itself, thirsty and tired
Nothing is safe when the tension is fired across the skeleton

How relaxed can you get?
When you think of the sunshine
as always inset
In yourself and your separate star
under the gun
Under the gun, under horizon,
under the south
Over the starlet and parch of your mouth

The river shows self,
it shows water releasing
As the distance between you and home keeps decreasing

Increasing
Decreasing

Increasing determines the depth of yourself
Decreasing diversions

The lines that graph
The dice on the ice

2. The slick dark holes of water to slice

This time the season is taking over the universe
Through the deep geography, the tracks
Of thickness and light, water and waxed-over
Sections, under the bridges
Over the ridges of class and glass
And graphs and stacks of dirt and smudge
Stains of grass interrupting the lake
Floats and flats of triangles and particles
Almost like icebergs
But small, sticking out
of the trim of the racks of stark grass

Taken over, the side of the
fishtail fin of a buoy sticks out

It looks like Maine, like a drifting oil well, on the other hand,
this in-season
is the drift of sharp edges,
the largest land yet
geographically, the water looks
still and the ice looks cracked

The tricks stick out from the stationary tine

Tines of islands
Trees sunk by trees
Grass and ice sunken in
The Hudson freezes

3. The birds can sit on the ice

The second day of winter
The tree limb fell
The tree stuck out from the silver sweep, the river
The sky
The river looks like slate, but the sky looks like snow
How does it do that? How do the trees simmer
In the steam over the lake?
Is this a steam train? Is this a steam lake?
Where is the shooting star?
Where is the curly stem of salt froth?
Shearing time, steering shards
Of frozen life, freezing time.

4. Mark told me sometime

I’ve been told
Water is not something except what it is
the scientists don't know the sheet of skin along my skin, my skin’s albedo
The supernatural lake and farm and trees, sticking out of the sea

How many lakes can I slip inside this poem?

As many as I allow, the tops of trees subsit
On air, starve themselves in the handing space my trick creates
Across the slide the train constructs, across the glide

Blinks in green and red
My purchases are overhead
My slip-skin neck is tense and taut
The lake swirls over then ends in liquid
Liquid steam across the slime
What’s true?

A small gladiator-fire, a forum of ice and stone in the lake
Like the firepit in my sister’s backyard, unlit

The stems of trees extend above
The trees ally the trim to the lake, unite the albedo

Solitary depths

Etc.

5. Steaming orange bluff coast jacket stuffed with thought

Who left that orange jacket steaming,
the small ship with the extended tip, the blue
live
boat and the circle of ice next to the trees?
Is it darker?
Is it more slithering, whither the don has gone?

6. *****

“So you were a widow yourself,” she notes quietly.

And someone laughs in a minute, and says, “I wonder if we’ll ever meet again…. We’ll be different. We’ll be better.”

Not a chuckle, a deep thunder sifted through an aging vocal pipe.

7. *****

The dusty grey of a winter river

A phlegmy cough and “Wow! What great empathy!”

Dirty stunted ice
Sculptural mountains
First last call and second last call for Hudson

HUDSON POEMS