Spuyten Duyvil

To me it isn’t what it obviously is 

to Jordan. That is, a real place.

Instead, it was always a couple 

of concrete platforms, a glimpse 

of river, overgrowth, a Metro North 

sign, the first sign in fact that things

were headed again in the right direction

after the cold and dark of Marble Hill,

back when the 9 train still clattered 

across the Broadway Lift Bridge. 

One more rung on the ladder home.

How did we pass the time back then,

waiting for a train? Maybe I had an ipod.

Maybe I paced and watched the ice float

past rowers in the Harlem River

and texted my virgin girlfriend. I feel

like I did my best thinking in those days.

I didn’t realize what Spuyten Duyvil meant

to me until I met my friends from the city

at the local station on their first visit 

up to my house (for a change). They piled 

into the little car I’d recently learned 

to drive--giddy from their adventure

into the wilds of Westchester--

and the first thing they said was

“Spuyten Duyvil,” over and over,

mocking it in that range of comic voices

they now deploy mostly to mollify toddlers.

I was so defensive. Of course 

it’s a silly name when you say it 

that way, but until then it’d been magic:

Abra Cadabra, a Yiddish invocation 

to open the doors at the cavemouth 

to the city, there at the rivers’ hinges.

We looked it up on incipient Wikipedia

and learned that it was actually Dutch.

A spouting devil. Wooden sailing ships.

Native people. The kind of biodiversity

that takes atheism off the table. 

A name for all the worlds we’ve lost.