Hudson [Feedback Requested]

My apartment looks out onto the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades, just north of New York Ciy. And with my dog, I walk 2-3 miles every day along it or in view of it. So its rhythms, seasons, and characters have become rather central to my days and nights. For several years I have wanted to express its various moods and contexts — I couldn't hope to meet Dar Williams's paean, but her song often runs in my head like, well, an undercurrent to my own experience. Only in the last week or so have I felt able to attempt any poetry again, however, after a two-year drought. This may be the first in a series, or it may be the only and last. But it is what I have today.

Morning's watercolors yield to
evening's oil paintings, which desaturate to the charcoal, pen-and-pencil renderings of the river at
night.


Gray ships haul great containers over green waters.
Tugboats push and pull thick barges between the mountains and the sea.


The river always changes: pollution, temperature, direction.


And yet...


Ducks and geese still lay eggs along its bank;
year after year they offer tribute to Persephone.


And yet...


Deer still seek out the river during winter's driest days,
when Demeter weeps to feed the headwaters.


The fish, the fowl, the flora, the fauna, and the frigates come and go.
The winds shift, the sun's arc moves, the rains fall hard and not at all.


We are baptized in its waters at dawn
and cast upon its floes at dusk.
We change.


We fish, we eat; we dive, we swim; we jump, we drown.


Our tears of joy and regret, like Demeter's, are 
tarns and tributaries of a river made so powerful
it will flow uphill to meet the moon.


The river, ever-changing, remains unchanged.  

EDIT: I took out a couple of words based on a suggestion by u/laurakathrynslife.

1
2