Photo by Jo Jo on Unsplash
New River, Pandemic
It will take your breath,
the endless wall,
but you will call again.
Lean out, plant the feet:
cinch of gravity at the waist,
below the wash, the rapid.
Barely visible the white minim
wears down, across the ages—
began withdrawals long before
the lookouts, then one day had scored
the gorge, the lookout, into being:
a hedge, a vista, a cut of shares
for the walkers of the wall—
endless, chafing the grainy
corona, the chew and whittle
of the white shreds in accumulation
taking different times—now the slow soles,
now the hammer battering pneumatic
in the tunnel, gnarling forth
the white-hot dove of Appalachia,
ascending in dust on the tongues
of unmasked men—river diverted, fierce
and viral, through the bronchus
of the mountain. The state confirmed
a case, at last, too late:
phlegmatic, behaving
like consumption in early stages,
every last whit involved:
the national river, its gorge narrow,
its wall endless—the course you make
when you think of your country.
Or are you the rock-wayfaring
stranger—mad for blue water,
at the waist cinched, rappelling
just over the hoary bottoms,
dreaming the endless wall
complete unto dust?
Lines from New York, On the Massachusetts
The distance never much
has closed between us:
training through thick rivalries
of sea towns (Connecticut
never more than now
its true name) my seatmate—
passable, faint, versed
as I am in the low
registers of city
dispatch (see everyone,
look at no one)—
reads until he feels me
rise, then himself rises.
It is a luxury to be
drawn east, Hudson to Charles,
the two remaining banks
where late Americans
entertain options:
two cities more water
than not—vast stillness
gilded with the motion
of ages. To catch a new form
in the flux—the backwash play,
the eddy groped to life by some
divine scientist’s
gigantic hand, throwing
surface-wise her dark
salvific sludge—
some such demotic
mesmerism draws me
straightway to the Esplanade,
mid-November, russet hour,
my skin galvanic
in the vibrations of sea-light.
What comes of surfaces
in the old reformers’ city:
how the wind works things up
back bay: the slight dilation
of the New England vein
in its final harbor—
wise turn, the current
goes inconsequent. The old
littoral breath, first and last
jeremiad of the tawny port,
rouses a congregation
of lost waves, anxious
for conviction. Bilge-beaten,
the esplanade holds course,
yet the very stones whistle,
and I may be yet
blown to Mount Auburn.
Turning I watch the latest
Americans redlining
across the Longfellow—
emergent, bundled, and slow
in profile against the north
sky; light breaking in their train
windows; strands of my hair
like hypnotist fingers
undulating toward
the moving interiors
(it is a luxury to draw)
no penetralia,
says the restless analyst;
see everyone, magnetic
the gate, live the feed,
the great common shouldering
into eternal pallor,
light cloak, the revelator:
our creed, overworn.
Turning again I watch
a jogger crossing Harvard
Bridge; gait like gravel
she flails mad rudiments
against the stalling airs;
from here only her struggle is real.
We could stand more being
driven under—small digs
into the bedrock,
the black welcoming door:
devices, connections
flag: the eardrum clutch,
sanctum tympanum:
our bodies learning the flood-
tide above us, before us—
truer surfaces
are made this way:
experience converted
into thought. The city
of notions, more water than not,
has bottom enough
to restore us unto absence.
De-winter
Bell to blossom to the work
stacking, snapping back the screens,
he refounds his property—opening
the water lines, hosing every surface—
each act a wager on fluidity and ice,
final frosts and first buds,
securities against the bending
seasons. Laps in and out
of his fathomless garageward
armamentarium—
north man rigging, raking,
scrubbing the street chat,
taking measure of the grounds—
he stomps out his stern
matins, the graceless gladness
of a planet prograding home-
ward, middle thick and bowed
with rotation, oblate
over what he finds to do.