The River Refuses its Name

On the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River

The river was the river’s before it was ours.

Pull back and see it as it was. Reverse the flow

Of time and unpeel our landscape from the land.

Take the names and maps away: the incised grid

Of highway, road, and bridge; the connective tissue

That gives a motion to our lives. Take away the imprint

Of the names we give to place and time:

This landmark, or that battle,

This statesman or that conglomerate

From overseas. The markings that we make

In all our ceaseless commerce in the world. The walls

Of glass, the city’s tunnels warrened underground,

And the restless bedlam shriek of all the dailiness

That keeps our lives afloat in what we know

As life. Modern times canyoning its heedless way

Through all our pasts and all we think we can control.

So thus the reassurance that we get from naming things

To get some fictive grip on all we think we’ve learned

Or know, a sense of where we’ve been and where we go,

The habitual views that we pass by each day

Distracting us in custom’s groove and rote

From what is now and what we’ve never really seen.

              So start over. Think beyond ourselves

This time and all that we kept out by all our putting in.

Go back to see the river as it was before we started time.

Don’t think of the river as ourselves.

Don’t think of the river as our history.

Don’t think of the river as anything but the river:

Cold, whole, inviolate, merciless in the integrity

Of its ceaseless mountainous riverflow.