A few days ago the New York Times website had an interactive feature about the “East Bathtub,” a section of the World Trade Center site where construction is way behind schedule. Workers are on the job twenty hours a day trying to catch up. Each day’s delay costs the Port Authority $300,000.
The bathtub is an 80-foot-deep pit, the foundation for two new towers. On the screen, the image of the pit moves slowly, providing a 360° view of this eerie abyss, an ocean floor with backhoes bent over like abandoned sea creatures. Men stand in the pit as though to give scale.
Monuments must go up, it seems. They must aspire, literally breathe out and fill the sky. But there is something moving in the idea of digging down, creating a void – the inverse of the inevitably bombastic buildings to come. A hole cut deep into the strata of the city, lined with the remnants of oyster shells and ships’ hulls, the fossils of flora that grow no more.
Showing posts with label new york. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new york. Show all posts
Manhattan, Fall
Dear Dad,
Do you miss the city?
You walked it all your life, and took me with you
through catacombs of schist and gneiss.
You showed me where the dead lie.
For what is this island
but the grave of those who came before
and lay down to make room for the new,
Lenape and Dutchman, free man and slave,
the immigrant and arriviste?
Like a coffin, lined by rivers.
I read about a woman who stood and
felt her husband’s body press against hers
in a rain of ash as the towers fell.
He was a fireman, a hero.
This was after you. You did not see this.
The dust settles, forms a new layer
on city fathers in famous churchyards and
long-lost slaves buried with their cowrie shells,
their babies tucked aside them.
I know there will be others.
A backhoe will find them and work will stop
for a day, a month. The potters field, the family plot –
it makes no difference.
The gap will close. New ghosts will join us.
Dear Dad, are you a ghost?
Do you walk the streets at night,
and scare late travelers and drunks against the wall?
Do you look for me?
Do you miss the city?
You walked it all your life, and took me with you
through catacombs of schist and gneiss.
You showed me where the dead lie.
For what is this island
but the grave of those who came before
and lay down to make room for the new,
Lenape and Dutchman, free man and slave,
the immigrant and arriviste?
Like a coffin, lined by rivers.
I read about a woman who stood and
felt her husband’s body press against hers
in a rain of ash as the towers fell.
He was a fireman, a hero.
This was after you. You did not see this.
The dust settles, forms a new layer
on city fathers in famous churchyards and
long-lost slaves buried with their cowrie shells,
their babies tucked aside them.
I know there will be others.
A backhoe will find them and work will stop
for a day, a month. The potters field, the family plot –
it makes no difference.
The gap will close. New ghosts will join us.
Dear Dad, are you a ghost?
Do you walk the streets at night,
and scare late travelers and drunks against the wall?
Do you look for me?
Two worlds: one above, one below.
No one imagines the 9/11 dead walking around under the wreckage or the pit that replaced it. Most of them were pulverized before the towers hit the ground. These men and women do not walk. They went into the air and across the harbor, lodged on windowsills and in the cracks between bricks. We breathed them in.
But the firemen who died a few weeks ago right next to them -- where did they go? They climbed a ghost tower and died in smoke and fumes, not from fire. They burned inside out.
The miners may still be walking, dead but walking, as well as those who tried to rescue them. But they walk on different paths, and may walk for a thousand years, tapping the wall, trying to make contact.
No one imagines the 9/11 dead walking around under the wreckage or the pit that replaced it. Most of them were pulverized before the towers hit the ground. These men and women do not walk. They went into the air and across the harbor, lodged on windowsills and in the cracks between bricks. We breathed them in.
But the firemen who died a few weeks ago right next to them -- where did they go? They climbed a ghost tower and died in smoke and fumes, not from fire. They burned inside out.
The miners may still be walking, dead but walking, as well as those who tried to rescue them. But they walk on different paths, and may walk for a thousand years, tapping the wall, trying to make contact.
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