Explorers

Holly Sears‘s art on this Poetry in Motion poster caught me by surprise the other day. These are elephants, but with the series title “Hudson River Explorers” and the sturgeon, I immediately thought of other giants, the mastodons and the mammoths. Those big creatures used to roam North America; Jefferson even charged Lewis and Clark with finding them out West because he had seen mammoth fossils and wanted to see a live one.

And old bones have been dredged out of the Hudson Canyon, the now undersea course of the river, carved during glacial maximum when it flowed a hundred miles further out then it does now. Megafauna swim still in the rivers of our dreams.

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This work and others by Sears can also be seen in laminated glass at the MetroNorth Tarrytown Station, where the wild goose grasses grow….