The Opposite of a Bridge Too Far

On September 29, once more nine NBBCers retraced one of our favorite routes: all the way around your insular city of the Manhattoes, girdled round by wharves like Indian isles by coral reefs!

We want to express our special thanks to Manhattan Community Boathouse for their warm welcome and hospitality. Or rather, we were warm, and they had Ice Pops and an outdoor shower!

Count the bridges and you’ll find that though we crossed under them not over them, they have connected us to our city in ways that many people never get to find.

You can also relive the trip here!

Next time, come join us!

West of Roosevelt Island (not pictured: Bridge 0: Queensboro!)

Manhattan from the west channel, Roosevelt Island

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,—

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

–Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge”

This entry was posted on October 1, 2019 by M. H..

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