W. S. Merwin, pt. III: By the Avenue, Union City

These photographs show the view from "Merwin Way," from the apartment building W. S. Merwin where he lived until his ninth yer, once his parents moved to Union City. At the end of Merwin Way was the imposing church situated on the Palisades, overlooking the Hudson. The entrance to the apartment building uses an eclectic mix of Renaissance and Gothic architectural styles, suggesting nobility. The building's vestibule still had its marble veneer and stairs leading to a second doorway. This feature was evidently remodeled. It was on these very stairs that the child William and his sister daily had to clamber down and up again with their mother or father guiding them.

W.S. Merwin, pt II: "By the Avenue" & Union City, New Jersey

I wanted to find the building where the American poet W. S. Merwin lived when he was a child, as well as "see" the Hudson River from the perspective that he had experienced. I knew that the First Presbyterian Church of Union City, where his father was minister no longer existed. It had been situated atop the majestic Palisades and was an imposing building, but no longer quite as grand as it once was when the Merwin family moved to Union City. Demolished, and, according to the reporter Margaret Schmidt (nj.com, april 20, 2009), it was an empty lot of brick, concrete, weeds and trees. First the apartment building where his family resided was photographed; a structure that in its own right was impressive and recalled an earlier day when architecural styles--Renaissance and Gothic-were freely mixed, here evident on the facade's cornice.
Part III will take us to the entrance and a view intoa hallway that still has its marble veneer.

W.S. Merwin, pt I: "By the Avenue"

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.

The Oil Deluge: no end in sight

Not until the oil pool in The Gulf Of Mexico runs dry of its own accord will it end. Why has this catastrophe occurred? It is a man-made disaster of truly epic proportions and its consequences will exist forever. Dead oceans are not an unrealistic outcome as well as destruction of species from the microscopic to the gargantuan. What happens then? Yes, shrimp and fish industries are likely to be eradicated for now. Who would even want to eat sea creatures that ingested Corexit, the dispersant, oil, and that also inhaled gas gushing from the well? Yes, the public will be reassured that all is well, but the well's effluents are not healthful, never will be, and in time, both present and in the future, the results will be apparent. Count millenia, not days, months or years. It is the ecology of our beautiful planet that is being degraded, destroyed and to what end? Money and more, power.

We cannot control volcanoes, we cannot control earthquakes, we cannot control gigantic tidal waves or tsunamis, but oil drilling is an invention of humankind. It can be stopped. Why not shift to alternate energy sources? That can be done, except energy corporations consider the short term and consumers are taught to desire the very thing or things that depend on oil consumption, such as gasoline for mammoth vehicles.

Every mother in my little town must pick up their child from school in a vehicle large enough to carry all the children that filled Old Mother Hubbard's shoe: "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,
She had so many children . . ."

Roses to begin the month of June

roses then and roses now: always glorious in memory and in the present

June 1, 2010: industrious labor

Self Protection: "beware," said the tree