From here the Palisades are another country,

their brindled cliffs seamy with snow,

the Hudson in its Acheron vein between us,

a hawk patrolling its course.

In a pre-surgical nook the westering sun

fires the window’s blood-red bow,

Christmas leavings.   Robed for the kindly knife,

I hunch in the wheelchair and wait.

Something’s familiar, domestic amidst the strangeness:

a sense that passage defines our days,

inching or plunging:  touch of another rim

beneath my restless fingers.

Johnson, deploring an absence of trees in Scotland,

claimed that one would foster gaping,

‘as a horse in Venice’.   Homebound or hapless, the mind

will have its fling, essaying.

God knows what dreams may come at the needle’s prompting,

but now for token I take the Bridge

as known and magnified by a singular woman,

broker of steel and rainbow.

Pole by pole her land’s measured, as when

the Legions pegged the beaten miles:

bronze and ochre and slate a house for the eye,

and green burring to honey.

Tugged by the earth it vaults, forever unfinished,

the Bridge salutes its bathing light,

the blue stubborn of course, and the knotted shadows,

but reaching the name of the game.