Erie Canal

Hailed raised-glass greetings to my friends in Spain, France, England, the Netherlands, and Belgium: It is still possible, in 2009, to cruise the 1825 Erie Canal for hours, in a slow, ancient canal boat refitted for cabin comfort, between locks, between towns, between villages, and out of sight of cottages and camps: long spells of boat-on-water. Tie the stern to a bush and the bow to a branch: this gin and these sandwiches, atop the deck reading clouds, with reveries of missed opportunities and adornments unswept. Let us say one is reading The Compleat Angler, or Praeterita, or the darker and brooding sonnets. Let us say it us not altogether such a dismissible hoot to speak of the objective correlative, and let that be the sun stepping behind the afternoon clouds. This sleeping is intimate. These dreams portend and these dreams are dopamine.