A Walk through Blissville
I walk in furrows that once were farmers’ fields,
searching for tree ferns. A lapsed Baptist cleric
shoos me from an orchard as a November sun
sets beyond her apple trees. I breathe in lichen,
liken today to a 15th Ward Smelling Committee’s
punt up Newtown Creek to catalog the odors.
Maybe I’ll see a raven as we motor up channel,
or turkeys, like I saw on a treeless boulevard
in Staten Island near the Fresh Kills landfill.
I dream of offal, garbage scows plowing up
Blissville cul-de-sacs to toss out carriage nags.
I pass deserted lots, clock factories, potholes
on the LIE, looking for friends, a place to find
some solace to lessen the stress of the stench.
Black-Crowned Night Heron
Up English Kills, a wading bird has stabbed an eel
below the glassy surface. Cries from the Schamonchi,
a ferry with a dumpster swimming pool, where weeds
keep channel worms alive. Furman’s Island housed
the largest glue factory in the world, Peter Cooper’s
tanning works before it moved upstate to Gowanda,
where its cookhouse sludge still pollutes Lake Erie.
Here fish are boiled to isinglass for paper and beer,
cow collagen is made into chairs, violins and Jell-O.
Way off in the distance, the Chrysler Building juts
out from behind a sewage plant. Turpentine, azo
dye, methane in the aquifer, where no otters play
by waterfront lots. It’s the night heron that patrols
the creek for shiners that draws us here each night.
The Endless Chain
I smell sulfur in the wind off toadfish salt flats.
Cord grass, mud snails, a whiff of conch decay.
These were tidal mills before a Brooklyn barge
crossed. We ground corn at Mill Basin, upriver
in Bushwick, by breweries, pigsties and timber
stores built by Peter Cooper’s saw-tooth chain.
I dream of lug nuts for mechanical advantage,
to propel El trains up Third Avenue as they
drip creosote on pushcarts and locomotives
down below, while chain boats slowly steer
the rivers. I keep inventing tools in my sleep,
contraptions to do the heavy lifting, like the
American language unburdening, like endless
chains of our relations, hauling us on, forever.
At Sunfish Pond
Mist rakes the sky by Kalustyan’s in Little India,
long gone are New York Harlem Railroad horses,
the elms or kissing bridge I seek out for my love
who’s arrived in purple sweatpants from Berlin.
I try to lure her to my lair, where the cattle pens
and farmsteads at 28th and Fourth once thrived,
where Bowery gangs would stock the abattoirs
and charnel houses for Peter Cooper’s glue.
Here buttonwood and fields of clover grew,
a high tide rising in brackish Sunfish Pond,
now a Blimpie by the Morgan Library. I tell
you I smell licorice or spell ‘licorice,’ I don’t
know which, wandering from Rolling Rock
to Ravenswood, as if I was the god of travel.
Torpedoes
There are shanty towns at Gravesend, for deck hands
and hungry Scots. Peter Cooper used Fort Hamilton
for piloting his torpedo, a gift to Greece for its war
against the Turks. Catboats ply the Narrows, a crew
arrives the day that Byron died. He uses grapeshot
cannon to furnish steam for the vessels plunging
into the lower bay. Oyster dredges test a blast, six
miles out, a Panama freighter mangles the wires
he steers with, the whole mess sinks. His boat is
found without a bomb on board. No one notes
beneath the waves that a million catfish wander,
oblivious to American good will. A slanting rain,
a push forward— recalling the words of Farragut
saying “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.”
Transatlantic Cable
You never knew when news would come. It took months
to hear of the defeat at Waterloo, that a child died in Bath.
The War of 1812 might not have been if an envoy sailed
on time. A cable laid between St. John’s and Nova Scotia,
a line played out across the mid-Atlantic, a knotted cord
above Atlantis, where giant squids held sway or crawled
above a sink hole in the earth. Not far from the Azores,
a cable snaked from Heart’s Content to Foilhommerum,
a Gaelic isle of grazing cattle, where news got through.
Slavers sailed both ways, Victoria sent a wire to James
Buchanan, at 0.1 words per minute, of mutual esteem.
Peter Cooper profited, just as his steel mills sot the sky
with acid. Too many volts did in the transatlantic cable,
but I give thanks for it now, as I text my friend in Perth.
At Jamaica Bay
A paradise of glossy ibises! Even in April, as ice grips
reed grass, terns congregate. If I was a body of water,
I’d be Jamaica Bay, where a Saab is ditched in slush,
an old piano sits mid-channel. I trudge in flurries with
my daughter, who’d rather be at Bell House in Gowanus
for an indoor barbecue. And hundreds of moths appear
and some say it would have made a great world harbor.
Railroads bought all shipping rights-of-way, and a cross-
borough parkway kept it as undeveloped swamp. I like
its relative obscurity, a gem despite its half-dead oyster
beds, a rush of jets, dilapidated fish oil fertilizer farms.
Fields of kale, urban rangers spearing Styrofoam at will.
Clouds of countless pigeons, a rotten dinghy. Not even
Peter Cooper saw its worth, despite his plans for progress.
Public Reading Room
For a dog, there are countless scents in the city, but for
me to isolate just one or two can test my flair for what
our atmosphere is made of. Here it’s anise, pine, I think.
On my way to the homeless shelter where I often sleep,
I stop for a book at Cooper Union, once the only public
reading room for working folks when arson, draft riots,
great awakenings consumed the land. It’s musty tomes
of Saturday Evening Post, Blackwood’s, Aristotle’s Masterpiece,
students thumbing Popular Mechanics, Architectural Review.
Once it even had a gallery of Christian art, with Titians,
Leonardo’s St. John Weeping and Canaletto’s landscapes.
I shop for corn flakes, no-pulp orange juice for the men.
Bernard wants to talk about Vietnam. Later, to snoring,
smelly feet, I grab a bunk, curl up with Edward Bellamy.
Red Cloud at The Great Hall
I’m Henry Red Cloud of Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
My people get by these days under the sun or moon
by turning to the stars for light above the Badlands.
The town’s hit bottom, awash in burgers, lung-rot
and tequila. In a dream, my namesake Red Cloud
returns to the hills, gives me the eagle quill I wear
tonight, generations after he stood here, as I accept
a prize at Cooper Union, for land that’s carbon free.
Grandfather said back then he’d no longer fight, that
we should work with pale-face pioneers, like Lincoln,
Clinton and Obama. Now I bring solar to the health
of the Black Hills, so the Sioux can be free of toxins
in the Cheyenne River, to bring back forgotten songs
of spirit animals who teach us to live our lives as one.
Plants of Manhattan
My friend James exhibits flowers from the Arctic,
the ones that grow in Brooklyn, those that
are native, not invasive. North of Harlem,
near Spuyten Duyvil, I find a cache of flora
dating to the Pleistocene. Amaranth, colic root,
asters, meadow zizia, Jesuit’s bark, widowsfrill,
chickweed, huckleberry, an ipecac that sprouts
at my knee. We’ve hit upon New Jersey tea
like Peter Cooper used to brew, kinnikinnick,
prickly bog sedge, not to mention scaldweed.
Azure bluet and leeks in a ravine, swamp pink,
cabbage, spread out in shafts of light. Orange
grass, even moonseed. I identify a lot of plants
but wonder if there isn’t buttercup or juniper.
Ringwood Manor
No one lives here now, but the portico and grounds
are full of spirits. Runaway slaves and some Lenape
indentured, a hundred years deceased, sweep porches
where they saw the ghost of Aaron Burr, eating alone,
while a revolutionary mapmaker sits with a compass
chewing pemmican in the rising fog. Rochambeau’s
army, in unmarked graves, whispers the Marseillaise.
By a patio, a patch of cool air intrudes at tea time
with a scent of lavender, no one knows why, save
to say it’s the lady of the manor. At an ironworks,
the magnetic center of Passaic, stink wafts up out
of slag heaps, raccoon bones and Indian tobacco.
Here Peter Cooper’s realm raked in raw materials,
a trail of leavings, his voice still shrill in the quarry.
At Penny Bridge
We take a cab to Calvary Cemetery, in memory
of girls who died of cholera, exhumed at night,
ferried from Manhattan to this rural tract where
the dead are restless or stirring in Gothic plots.
We walk by elms, evergreens, climb a hill to pick
toadstools in a glen. We want to smell the lilacs
in the wind, where ancient chimneys stand and
we can lie in fields of phlox bursting into bloom.
We row to abandoned islands of industrial decay,
discover graves where all the clocks have stopped.
Purple finches mob in a potter’s field, at the closed-
down Penny Bridge station, where mourners come
in droves. We loiter on a rise to glimpse a far-off
clutch of towers in the town, glinting in the sunset.
Bishop’s Ring
A painter sits in a locust grove, mixing his spirits
for rendering a sky, to try and capture the eerie
fallout of an eruption. He’s never been to Java
and is not keen to travel. But there’s afterglow
from Krakatau that sits as ash on windowpanes.
There’s a blue-brown ring around the sun today
that drives mechanics out to stoops on Broadway.
The smallest variation in the pivot of the Earth
sends animals, adventurers, to climb new heights
on mountains sliding to the sea. The last quagga
died as the slave trade collapsed in Great Britain,
the Orient Express connecting Paris to Bucharest.
When will the sunsets pale? The azure halo augurs
an end to a machine age and beckons new horizons.
A History of the Newtown Creek
I’m taken by this seaway dredged for coal boats:
the smell of linseed oil, the smell of tarpaulin,
the smell of hyacinth, burning rubber, wax,
the smell of car exhaust, pig iron and pine,
the smell of squalor, diapers, dogwood, sex,
the smell of fins and fishnet, arugula, Shiraz,
the smell of eucalyptus, locusts, lemon rind.
The smell of boiling bones, salt or pickle brine,
the smell of goldenrod, car fumes, rotten fruit,
the smell of gelatin, hair gel, fresh-baked bread,
the smell of guns, oak-hewn hulls and the dead
the smell of tar, mud flats, peat moss, gasoline,
the smell of tiredness, dog-scent, autumn wind,
the oldest channel to thread a fragrant riverside.
