Subliminal History of New York State: Troy

Mount Ida

Infinity round dead oak tree
The gravestones tipped and stolen
Mausoleum in the hills
Van Rensselaer did deeded.

Two kids on bikes do figure eights
Surprise to find bones digging
Soon its on a sunny day
Bulldozers begin digging.

In cellars round hold stolen stones
Our bodies weren’t exhumed yet
Flattened hills are unmarked tombs
The buzzard circles fly high.

One crow it sits in summer time
We stand amid a grave sunken
Flowers they surround us round
And death it still is calling.

114th Street, Lansingburgh

Was Moby Dick here buried,
Inside this very park?
Come metal forgers farming,
Cross from shipping’s defunct dock.

These cavernous great creatures
Grew in a town called Troy,
The edges of an empire,
In which sits a Trojan horse.

Some monitor was born here
And visions of a whale,
The captain tried to tame it,
New clad iron ships wage war.

And if it was a battle
Between a whale and boat,
Throw in a wooly mammoth,
Quakes await inside the earth.

Diamond Rock

Do we like our diamond rock?
They are unfortunates tears;
From the crevice they have took
All the ancient dust.

Do we like to walk atop
High ridges, backs atop beasts?
From upright the righteous stand,
Dangling our feet.

Hudson Mohawk

It’s at this very corner,
A turn from slow to fast,
Of harnessed river waters,
And people strength galore

Industrial Revolution,
An axis of great force,
With independent progress
The river changes course.

And like in ancient Rome time
Are monoliths shown bare,
The ruins of an empire
Now see the winter day.

From Henry Hudson

Hudson entered the great river and ascended it to the height of its navigation. Of the mouth of the Mohawk. But he found no navigable passage by which he could sail to the imagined sea West of Virginia.

From Troy’s One Hundred Years, 3rd Edition, 1789-1889, by Arthur James Weiss

Subliminal History of New York State: Rome

Animals Don’t Tell Stories

The animals don’t tell stories
That are written down in books,
Their tails are long and detailed
And secured within their skins.

Delta Lake Has Drowned

See the phantom steeple,
Water town below,
Row the boats at midnight,
Meeting the in between.

Hover from the cellar,
Go inside the earth,
Watch your little baby,
Taken up from the hearth.

Fort Stanwix

Nineteen-seventy-six it came,
A fort of eminent domain,
Rome was seized and its downtown fell –
This is our bicentennial.

State School

Compressed upon my chest,
Heaviness above,
Continue layers through,
Find the bubbling brook.

Through attic secret floors,
Found in mortared doors,
You never even knew,
I am in the wall.

The Great Carry

The Quality Inn is a meeting spot
To which canoes were towed to,
There is the Deowainsta
Where ideas and commerce flow.

Two rivers and break in the mountain rock,
A deep and dug connection,
Before the stones are turned,
Footprints form in muck make maps.

Subliminal History of New York State: Palmyra

Passage

There was a road we made it so,
And progress was its route you know,
We’re sick of this and done with that,
The time it is to start our own.

O’er sticks and steel the passage goes,
And people came from all around,
The soil was ripe for turning,
We’re calling heaven from the earth.

New Land

New lands they never were new,
Working akin to time,
The glaciers they gleaned and melted to,
Forever is not a long time.

Hydesville Road

Within the drumland valley,
Built upon a vast gravel pit,
Two sisters heard the rapping of
A dead peddler in the wall.

There is a road called Hydesville,
High evangelist country round,
The girls they don’t just sit there still,
It is time they start to talk.

The highway reinvented,
Spirit begins awakening.
No longer women hesitate
And speak through another one.

Hydesville Road New

Car junk remains transportantive junk,
To take from one another,
And in its midst a sound remains,
Tapping from one to another.

Across the street fall houses deplete,
Awaiting new connection,
And in the midst foundation sits,
Sheltered atop of the cold ground.

Ganargua Creek

How far to jump from Watervliet
And to a creek called red,
Chorus: Oh our road runs West, my boys,
Oh our road runs West
And upward o’er an aqueduct
Don’t interrupt the mud.
Chorus.

They say the muck was navigable
Next to a ditch was dry,
Chorus
Against all possibility
To walk upon the sea.
Chorus.

Text

Books are typset and written,
A word fixed in the glass,
Transference of a message above,
And passed betwixt the past.

Subliminal History of New York State: Lockport

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Subliminal History of New York State: Lily Dale

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