This is an archetype; her name is Aurore.
If you start again, with her this time,
it will be her under you like a small craft,but this time
she will buoy you up, till you drift on her balance
down a stream silvery with trout, to 
the swell of a great river.
 
She'll marry you, and the river will be fecund,
shad running in enormous schools,
the work of days to harvest,
nights to rest with your head in her lap,
the stars marking where you are, where you've been.
 
You'll leave her when you reach the 
river towns, where ferries cut back and forth,
where the lights teem and spatter,
but you'll go back to the docks again, and you'll
find her, younger now, though the craft is older.
The hawsers strain and cry out against their warping.
She'll cast off with you into the night current.
 
With the dawn, you'll drift into the sound.
Lights are blinking in the dark west, but you don't care.
She stands in the prow, outlined by soft rays.
To either side, shoals of herring glimmer.
                        

I come from a place that they call the wild north,
By the tears of the clouds I was nurtured
And a free-flowing stream told me, "Follow your dream,"
As the waters run down to the future.
Each rivulet grew with the fast-melting snow,
And they joined where the shad were a-running,
By a Iroquois longhouse of bark and of hide,
On the banks of the flowing Hudson.

In '77 we came from our homes 
To defense of Fort Ticonderoga.
Then followed downstream as a rabble in arms
To stand fast in old Saratoga.
We were merchants and farmers and men from the woods
At the dawn of America's freedom,
And the sapling that stood like a towering oak.
On the banks of the mighty Hudson.

I worked on the sloops and the schooners that sailed
To Catskill, Poughkeepsie and Kingston,
And one day I looked up and I saw the tall stacks 
Of the steamboat of Robert Fulton.
And the barges that plied down the river each day
Carried apples and timber and bluestone,
While Irving and Cooper, Cole, Church, and Durand
Told the world of the art of the Hudson.

I built the great bridge that the call Tappan Zee
Of cables and girders and pylons,
And I looked on with horror as death from the clouds
Brought the twin towers down from the skyline.
But we keep on rolling, that river and I,
And new life grows out of destruction.
That lake in the mountains, those big city lights,
And the banks of the mighty Hudson.