ANOTHER DECADE, HUDSON RIVER

then    we turn our backs to the symbols

sit into    another river
a dark blue corner of a dark blue room

when hearing is blacker    ten years the jetty has leaned whispering against water
in the little park     ten years the tender green accordion of trees has played
children charging down the April to April steps

clouds charging down their reflection    water now bright now dark
and squirrel's pulped organs open
a blood-red photo album    reality stings even through glass
even a soaked hand couldn't touch the lined-up days

river    a blank textbook hanging from the past window
questionsing now only the single remaining page    no need to learn vagrancy
weariness    tethered to a water bird flying low
the spinning whirlpool    exit for all the world's skyscrapers
flee    flee to plastic flowers    no need to learn vanishing

Hudson just like a name formed by the sound of the wind
lamplight's passing glance    just like ghost fire hidden in human bodies
switched on    just like a notch blown away at will
a rosy notch twilight recorded on the sky
whoever has understood it    will live into a poem
unending past events

room in a room    filled with water of a decade
corner in a corner    painting the dark blue of distance
the way we sit forever turning our backs on the ocean
listening to the waves shatter    rubble savagely smashing a decade
telephone lines broken    cries for help blindly float through a decade
river the colour of forgetting    can't forget
each day    two hands full of crimson steel tumbling straight down

no need to learn burning    handful of ash fixed in
tight-shut eyes    moon like a scooped-out pip
singing contralto    requiem for every river valley
every place that flows away appears each time after dying
banks paved underfoot    have been thousands of times removed
a pale fishbone always has another end glowing with phosphorescent light
endurance    to slap a lifetime's final
farewell    pushing out tonight again

with the look of a room thrust into the universe survey how much this sunken ship could further sink
our backs turned to zero drawn as the horizon
how much farther it migrates    then crazy blue is blue enough to be black
in a lost accent    Hudson pressed against
a bluestone wellhead buried at the gate of an ancient Chinese village
destruction touches its own diameter of one day
one drop    gathers snow left for us
with the beauty of survivors and the cruelty of survivors