Henry Hudson Looks at the Hudson by David Shapiro

Henry Hudson Looks at the Hudson

by David Shapiro

(published in Jacket Magazine, August, 2003)

Henry Hudson turned to me and said:

Be expressionless and strong as me,

Be grim and green, stout as Cortez,

Double lock yourself within

Like a warning wife, and be divorced

From nothing, at last be a statue

Of a self, and threaten at night like a landing,

Turn to your river, like a monist on a raft,

And always found your river on a fault,

Be blind and copper, a mania on a column,

Obscured, finally,...