By the Avenue
published in The Shadow of Sirius, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2008, 8.
Through the Trees and across the river
with its surface the color of steel
on a rainy morning late in spring
the splintered skyline of the city
glitters in a silence we all know
but cannot touch or reach with words
and I am the only one who can
remember now over there among
the young leaves brighter than the daylight
another light through the tall windows
a sunbeam sloping like a staircase
and from beyond it my father's voice
telling about a mote in an eye
that was like a mote in a sunbeam
Thus began my search to find the site where the author Merwin looked at the Hudson River when he was young. I, too, grew up with the mighty Hudson, but on the Manhattan side. It is embedded in me as a the first wonder and the orientation for my life.
Looking further, I found in Summer Doorways, Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005, 17, 24, 27-28, the Young Merwin recounting his youth in Union City, New Jersey. There his father, a Presbyterian minister, "had . . . accepted a 'call' to a big church in Union City . . . on top of the Palisades overlooking Hoboken and the river, with the Manhattan skyline as its backdrop. We lived there until the year I was nine." I remembered the glimpse of the Hudson River that we had from the bottom of 4th Street in Union City, looking across Palisade AVenue, past my father's church, and the time or two when my father had allowed me to accompany him to shis small, crammed, musty,,dusty study at the top of the steep, narrow, boxed-in spiral stairs out of the vestry in the back of the church. One window looked out over Hoboken and the harbor and the river, with the ferries coming and going, the freighters and the liners catching the west light, and beyond the jagged, gray glittering skyline of New York, looming in its silent distance, its own dimension." Merwin's father permitted his son to accompany him as long as he remained quiet while the pastor wrote his sermons. Promising that he would be able to be silent when his father worked, the boy "watched the river utterly rapt in the vast scene out in front of me . . . Whole trains were crossing the river on railroad ferries, all shades of orange in the sunlight. White puffs of steam climbed out of the unseen whistles and horns, the distant sounds arriving faint and faded, a long breath afterward. I was seeing something that I could not reach and that would not go away."
The shades of orange Merwin mentions I witnessed as well, but my vantage point was farther north. It was in the late afternoon that the glorious gold and purple and red appeared in the sky over The Palisades. Never have I forgotten that paradise; perhaps it can be regained, but even farther north on the river, at some distance from the city, the Manhattan of my childhood and youth. Then life will have come full circle. Now Manhattan has lost its ferries, its tugboats, its grittiness, its very life. It is now the enclave of the wealthy and the Hudson is for leisure not for labor.
Having discovered the poetry and prose of W. S, Merwin--where was I before; why do I not remember his contributions to The Nation, his stint as poetry editor; why did I not grasp his greatness, and I do not use this word lightly. Perhaps I was too engaged in teaching, research, family, great upheavals, at least for me, to notice. Now I understand or try to at least. Touched to the heart by Merwin's incomparable "truth speaking," as I call it in lieu of "authenticity" or the words of literati--aether that cannot be collected in the hand, I am stung in the heart as St Theresa was; an analogous sensation, with the visual and the verbal coalescing in perfect harmony to express the humble but greatest truths of life's experiences. I can only thank Garrison Keillor for Youth and setting me on my journey.
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