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Poems for The Brooklyn Bridge 125th Anniversary, May 24, 2008
Edited by Daniela Gioseffi & Richard Haw

Click to Excerpts: BROOKLYN BRIDGE: A Cultural History by Richard Haw
Selected Poems by
Hart Crane, Alfred Corn, Daniela Gioseffi, Garcia Lorca, Cynthia Hogue, Carl Rosenstock, Harvey Shapiro, Grace Shulman, Ken Siegelman, and Walt Whitman. Click Below or Scroll Down.

Last fall I moved across the river
and sometimes to watch the lights
would walk home over the bridge.
It was so misty that night
you couldn't see the city or—
I don't know why I walked—
the water for the dark.

It was like walking over nothing
into nothing though I didn't think this
at the time, but of my young son, another soon,
and what I want to give them in life.
And also of my wife. He was so still
I'd not have seen him,
but he coughed.
He sat out where a girder joined an arch.

What are you doing man? I called,
feeling dumb. What could one say?
Whatever comes; I later understood
how circumstance leaps away from words.
I was surprised he answered, not what
he said but that voice over the river:
Nobody cares if I live or die.

I said, Come home with me, brother.
He didn't move one way or the other
so I thought, He's listening.
Come to my house for dinner, man,
then if you still feel no one cares
I'll walk you back to this bridge,
and push you off myself.

Soon, police arrived, pushing me aside
as they crawled toward him. He cried,
Leave me alone, and, You make another move
I'll jump. As if they'd heard those words
a thousand times but never when meant,
they came on. He stood up.

I saw how thin he was, and helpless,
watched him with deliberation—
the next-to-last act of his life—
push up his sleeves before he dove,
silent, into a larger silence
where we could not follow,

falling without ourselves, but left
with ourselves, men on a bridge
thinking (without thinking)
as we turned toward home
we might have girdered
the girderless air.

“Crossing Brooklyn Bridge” was originally published in Southern Review 30.1 (January 2004), in an earlier version. It was collected in The Never Wife (Mammoth Press (c) 1999), revised (this version, with original title). Used with permission of the author. Cynthia Hogue has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Incognito Body (2006) and Flux (2002). She is the co-editor of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (2006) and the first edition of H.D.’s WWII novel, The Sword Went Out to Sea, by Delia Alton (2007). She teaches modernist and contemporary poetry at Arizona State University, and lives in Phoenix with her husband, the French economist, Sylvain Gallais.

Brodie bowed and leapt off the stage,
Made his way through the crowd, to the bar.

NOTE : On July 24, 1886, the front page of The New York Times proclaimed that, on a bet of $200, Steve Brodie had successfully jumped from the New York end of the Brooklyn Bridge — the first to do so and live.

There is considerable disagreement over many of the facts of Brodie’s life, particularly with regard to the early years before his fame. For instance, sources say that, at the time of his feat, he was variously a Fourth Ward newsboy and long distance pedestrian, a bootblack around City Hall, a numbers runner in Brooklyn, or unemployed. Even his age and physical appearance seem to be in dispute. (In the one extant photograph of him, he is slim and dark haired.)

However, all the sources agree on a few basic facts. First and foremost, after the event, and because of the publicity attending it, Brodie was able to parlay his new-found fame into a tavern on the Bowery. It quickly became a gathering place for sports heroes and other celebrities, and a mecca for tourists. A play titled Pearl of the Bowery and performed regularly at Brodie’s saloon (Brodie played himself), recreated the event as a rescue. When he died in 1901, at the age of 38, he was a man of considerable property, leaving behind an estate worth approximately $100,000.

Finally, it should be noted that, in “Brodie’s Fancy,” Brodie is wrong when he says the first man to jump off the bridge was a “Frenchman.” The first to attempt the jump was one Emmett Odlum, a swimming instructor from Washington D.C. On May 19, 1885. wearing a red shirt, Odlum leapt off the bridge, to his death.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Carl Rosenstock. All rights reserved by the author. Carl Rosenstock was born in Albany, New York, and grew up on a farm near there. He received a B.A. in Asian History from Union College, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Vermont College. His work has appeared in various magazines, and anthologies. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York where he currently curates the Night-&-Day Reading Series.

The National Cold Storage Company contains
More things than you can dream of.
Heard by the Brooklyn Bridge it stands
In a litter of freight cars,
Tugs to one side; the other, the traffic
Of the Long Island Expressway.
I myself have dropped into it in severn years
Midnight tossings, plans for escape, the shakes.
Add this to the national total—
Grant’s tomb, the Civil War, Arlington,
The young President dead.
Above the warehouse and beneath the stars
The poets creep on the harp of the Bridge.
But see,
They fall into the Naitonal Cold Storage Company\
One by one. The wind off the river is too cold,
Or the times too rough, or the Bridge
Is not a harp at all. Or maybe
A monstrous birth inside the warehouse
Must be fed by everything— ships, poems,
Stars, all the years of our lives.

In Brooklyn harbor
The last light hits the tugs
And Battery shines,
And no one wants to
Make the City any more.
“The Oriental Warrior”
Riding in the bay.

Gulls between the sun
And Governor’s Island.
Jehovah’s Watchtower
With the Squibb tripos
Ever golden. We play
Basketball in the park
Along the harbor. The Bridge
Still stands, getting ancient
With its freight of poetry.
_________________________________
Copyright (C) 2006 by Harvey Shapiro from THE SIGHTS ALONG THE HARBOR: NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS, MA.: Wesleyan. Harvey Shapiro’s many books include How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems (2001) and National Cold Storage Company (1988). He published his first book in 1953, and has taught at Cornell University, Bard College, Columbia University, and Yale University. In his career as a journalist, he has served as editor of the New York Times Book Review and senior editor of the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York.

From the beginning, it was life or death,
the maker and his son lost to the river
their bridge would hold down -- one struck by a ferry,

the other by caisson bends -- young Roebling’s wife
learning math to redeem the family prophecy:
“It will be beautiful.” And so it was, and is,

corseted to brace not merely horsecars
but trucks. Now, the sky vast after dense buildings,
I wander under Gothic towers and watch

trapezoids spring skyward, spun wire ropes
quivering in sunlight. All around me
today, like dancers stepping with unknown partners,

men and women travel east to Brooklyn,
set-jawed, some with kids in strollers,
then meet and sidle past those striding west.

“Cyclists dismount!” an unseen caller shouts,
and bikers obey. The crowd breaks for a woman
who lugs a canvas. Buckling some, she tacks

into the wind, not letting go. A man
carries roses, blooms pointed down. Some wild hope
in their striding cries “It will be beautiful,”

and raises ghosts: where walkway meets the road,
a vision of my grandmother in 1920,
belled skirt, braided red hair. She slithers under

her stalled Ford and out again, tarred black,
then cranks the engine. The cargo, prints
she’s engraved on woodblocks with penlike

gouges kept on shelves, riling my grandfather
until he uttered “Flora!” twice, and cursed
the inky floors, then tromped out, slammed the door.

At twelve she’d walked the bridge to mark shirt collars
in a factory. Married young, she longed
to make black collars; she saw waves and sea

reversed to hazard what would be when wood
was pressed to paper, dreams caught in intaglio.
She drove from Brooklyn through cathedral windows,

past rude stares, to show her prints in “the city,”
smoothing a crumpled New York driver’s license,
one of the first earned by a woman, and bearing

four invisible words: “It will be beautiful.”
She built no bridge, but crossed this steel
and sand-colored granite arched over schooners

that killed before it joined, that said it’s not
just striving, but the risk. With the fixed gaze
of one drawn to hard tasks, she finds me, frowns,

slides into the Ford, and rattles on.
Now, seeing caissons planted in the riverbed,
firm as punctuation, I trek the arch

in wonder. On the Manhattan turnoff,
a road sign reads BRIDGE, white arrow pointing left.
Once you’re in that lane, you can’t turn back.

Copyright (c) 2002 by Grace Shulman, appeared in Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Houghton, 2002), reprinted from For That Day Only. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Grace Schulman is the author of six books of poems, including The Broken String, Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems and The Paintings of Our Lives. Among her honors are the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, the Delmore Schwarts Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and New York University's Distinguished Alumni Award. Her poems have received three Pushcart prizes, and Days of Wonder was selected by Library Journal as one of the best poetry books of 2002. Editor of The Poems of Marianne Moore (Viking, 2003), she is Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely in journals, here and abroad. Schulman is former director of the Poetry Center, 1974-84, and former poetry editor of The Nation, 1971-2006. She lives in New York City and in East Hampton, Long Island, with her husband, Jerome.

She was always less a passageway
From island to island,
Than a portal through time and space;
Much the way that Heaven’s Gate
Was seen by immigrants in tenements
and clapboard shacks Crowded
into cobble streets on either side
that fell inside her shadow...
Just in reach it seemed of some divinity.
Above the chimney smoke
and mad congestion of the boats.
Anting like the traffic of today;
A place where the sun seemed
closer than the clouds by day
and where the moon gave access to the stars.
Arranged like souls they waked
Telling them it was all okay on the other side...
A pick and hammer generation who knew the cost
Of human loss when filling firm its pilings;
Anchored in the shifting mud and forceful eddies
Of a river that challenged its completion...
Even now, her elephantine legs
Of smoothed morse stones
Grandmother on our Brooklyn trains
Where old women shoe their determination to stand the ride
With heavy stockings rolled and knotted at their knees;
There are no dainty models that substitute for endurance.
I wonder when its engineers
Caught up in the mechanics of revised designs
Came to see the larger picture
of the men who arced her lattice cables
Looking like their Brooklyn backyard grapevines.
Where they toasted Sundays with the silent smiles
Of those who glimpsed at Heaven’s Gates
While they were still alive.

Copyright © 2002-2008 by Ken Siegleman. "Heaven's Gate" first appeared on The Borough President's website, www.brooklyn-usa.org/Pages/Poetry. Appointed by Borough President, Marty Markowitz, Ken Siegleman has served as Poet Laureate of Brooklyn for the past six years. Siegleman served as a public school Social Studies teacher for many years in his hometown Borough. He has published many student poets on the Borough President’s website, and hosts “Brooklyn Poetry Outreach” an open microphone reading series for Brooklyn poets at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble located at 267 Seventh Avenue. In 2008, a documentary film on his life, titled "Fading to Zero," was premiered at Kingsborough Community College.

1
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west-sun there half an hour high—
I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are
more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and
more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
2
The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,
The simple, compact, well-joined scheme, myself disintegrated, everyone
disintegrated yet part of the scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future,
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk
in the street and the passage over the river,
The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,
The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of
Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see tham as they cross, the sun half and hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to
the sea of the ebb-tide.
3
It avails not, time nor place – distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation,
or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river and the bright flow,
I was refreshed,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood
yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemmed pipes
of steamboats, I looked.
I too many and many a time crossed the river of old,
Watched the Twelfth-month seagulls, saw them high in the air floating with
motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest
in strong shadow,
Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,
Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Looked at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the the shape of my head
in the sunlit water,
Looked on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,
Looked on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Looked toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving....
….

The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome
crests and glistening,
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite
storehouses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flanked on each side
by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high
and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over
the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.
4
These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,
I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,
The men and women I saw were all near to me,
Others the same-others who look back on me because I looked forward to them,
(The time will come, though I stop here today, and tonight.)
5
What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not – distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walked the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution….

9
Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edged waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!….

Walt Whitman, along with Emily Dickinson, is the most iconic poet of American literature. An American original, he is read far and wide throughout the world as the poet of "Democratic Vistas," and the hope of democracy. Born on Long Island, in the Village of West Hills in 1819, he lived much of his life in Brooklyn and wrote for The Brooklyn Eagle, a popular newspaper of his day. A printer and a journalist, he hand-set and published his book Leaves of Grass in Brooklyn Heights nearly half a century before The Brooklyn Bridge was built. The book would change and be expanded upon through various editions. This poem comes from the section called the Calamus Poems. His poem, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" was written long before The Great Bridge was completed. Yet, as Dr. Richard Haw explains in the introduction to this feature of poems about The Bridge, Whitman's poem has always been associated with The Bridge. Whitman loved crossing The East River by Ferry and the Fulton Ferry Boat House that he knew still stands at the edge of the river at the bottom of Fulton Street where lines from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," written in 1856, have been duplicated in metal along the railings of Fulton Ferry Landing. The poet died on March 26, 1892 in Camden, New Jersey, where he was entombed. Born only thirty years after George Washington became president, Whitman was a great admirer of Thomas Paine and was swept up in the egalitarian dreams of what he believed would become a great new nation of populist ideals. Disillusioned by the Civil War and working as a field nurse through part of it, he wrote interesting observations of his war years collected in Specimen Days. He managed to have Leaves of Grass read by Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom admired it, despite the fact that some prominent literary critics of his day panned it. In defense, he wrote and published anonymous reviews in praise of his own book, and toward the end of his life, he was still selling his bookfrom a basket on the streets of Camden. Today, Leaves of Grass is among the greatest of American classics, translated into nearly every language of the globe. ._________________________________________________________________________