RIVERS

And freight: now the Hudson, at Chambers Street, laden with one more dolorous meaning. Thrown in few digits from the jealously guarded present: back, now, to Etel's poem of joining rivers in Baghdad and New York, to my now quaint grappling with its lament's participation or non in HOPE from a perch just north of the Cloisters. Back, in anachronism, to an East River tainted with the wounds delivered by mechanisms of civil war through Melville's stanzas, hammeringly. To perspectives, of civilization and barbarity, on the river that flows both ways, not at all purged of content in this motion imaginatively backward, but taking on more, forth and back, an inverse Mannahatta. Density of these distances crossed.

And incommensurate density of loneliness. Avery's, now our own. How many losses can a city pile up?

What code, precarious, a sufficiency or hindrance to carrying those losses—remains of cherished belonging—across to us?