The Mighty Hudson
by Claire Harman
‘It’s odd how they had the same name’ – New York Star
After ten years of truck-work, he looked round and sighed;
Left a note for his nephew – ‘The parts of my radio’ –
And made for the city in a frilled shirt.
Found a walk-up full of the mythical skyline
With the river in front of it grey as a vein
And a tide running up into unreal suburbs.
Practised his weights on a fat co-lodger,
Lifting her one-handed up to the cobwebbed light.
Heard her hot geyser of giggling straight-faced but happy.
Arm-wrestled in bars with less effort than sighing,
Was bought beers by men who pincered his biceps,
Made friends with the barman. Got mystique by not smiling.
Enjoyed a short local career as a hero
After righting a load that got stuck on GW Bridge;
The newspaper posed him lifting a Merc into parking.
Soon after was called by Los Niños Non-Animal Circus
And shot to the top of the bill juggling three girls in lycra;
Their thighs left sequins stuck in his sideburns
And scents that perplexed him: one night he climbed onto their trailer,
Peeled back the roof like a ring-pull,
Picked Leonie out of her bunk through the skylight.
Didn’t know his own strength, that’s for certain,
Nor hers, when she struck with the whip, with the poker, the shotgun.
The lights of Jersey dimmed in the pith of his head
As he staggered back into the water, his namesake,
Keen as a mother to hurry him home.
Past the dark lighters, the bilge boats;
Past Peekskill, Poughkeepsie and Kingston,
Bear Mountain twirling oddly away like a girl.
The leaves blazing red as the fall, and the branches red too.
From Times Literary Supplement (8 August 2014). Reproduced with kind permission from The Times Literary Supplement.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Winner Best Single Poem 2015
About Claire Harman
Claire Harman began her career in publishing, at Carcanet Press and the poetry magazine PN Review, where she was co-ordinating editor in the 1980s. Her first book, a biography of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, was published in 1989 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for ‘a writer of growing stature’ under the age of 35. She has since published biographies of Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson and edited works by Stevenson and Warner. Jane’s Fame, a study of Austen’s authorship and reception, was published in 2009 and her new biography of Charlotte Bronte will be published in October 2015. Claire has taught English at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford and creative writing at Columbia University in New York City.
‘The Mighty Hudson’ – shortlisted for the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – began with a sweeping comment from an American friend showing her the view over the Hudson river in upstate New York: the phrase “The Mighty Hudson” set her thinking. “I thought what a great name for a strong man that would be, and I suppose that, and the place-names along the drive and the look of the blazing autumn leaves all lodged in my mind somehow.”
“The story of the poem emerged quiet effortlessly but is entirely made up. I was very impressed by how plausible it seemed, so made up the epigraph from the newspaper – and the newspaper – to give it some actual credibility. And I had a sense of the rhythm before any of the story, even: that long thrumming line seemed to be there in advance, appropriate and anticipatory. There’s something inherently deadpan about it.”
