crossing in fog (in what season?) the Hudson from Beacon to Newburgh, the bridge lights are feathery halos, successive pools of blurred honey light half swallowed by the damp, the slick roadway black patent disappearing in ticked segments into the chill thickness beyond the headlights’ tentative beam, the light turned back before its reach like an uncertain suitor. The river far below black and silent and deep turning here toward Storm King and the highlands looming seaward and history heavy over us. Soaked wool scent of the Continental Army, ankles aching; smell of bruised Dutch apples in winter stone cellars; lavender of lover’s pale flesh through black knit stockings. Moans or perhaps only the memory of foghorns and the bright hiss of new radials beneath the white car. Consciously anxious, shallow breath and a woeful empty fear just where the diaphragm lays upon the stomach, flesh clammy as if we walked this dark span in the dampness, neck and arm hairs pricked with a conscious sense of uncertainty about what comes next. Children half sleeping in the backseats of automobiles long ago in the stale silver haze of cigarette smoke. White lines disappearing in paved segments of indecipherable code, small run in the calf of a black stocking a muffled yell.