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.
If Whitman had written Crossing Brooklyn Ferry today he would have to give it a different title because he would cross the East river from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back by subway, riding one of the hundreds of trains that travel the system's 700 plus miles of track. But as the poet understands: everything else would be the same—with the possible exception of terror alerts.
It's Thursday and I'm on the phone with my wife. Let's call her Nelly, because she's nervous. She's heard the reports of a terrorist plot to set off bombs in the subway this weekend. "Can we take a cab?" Nelly answers her own question: "There won't be any cabs."
Strength in numbers: we're New Yorkers—let's play the percentages. One report says 19 men are planning to set off bombs in the subway this weekend—is 19 a magic number now? What are the odds that it will happen tonight between 6 and 7? And if it does what are the odds that you'll be on one of 19 trains out the hundreds running? And in the car that the bomb goes off? "So, we should just go home and if it happens, it happens," says Nelly. What other choice do we have? The strange optimism of my argument goes off the rails as I mention that al-Qeada's preference for simultaneous explosions improves our odds even more. I just want to go home and see my wife.
She'll leave the Village at 6pm and I'll leave Wall St at 7pm; meaning that we won't both be on the system at the same time. We've got a plan. We'll get home and then...we'll be home.
2
...
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 them as they cross, the sun half an 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.
"It's the same building." This thought occurs to me as I step out onto Wall street at 7pm. I just started this new gig 2 weeks ago. I haven't worked a corporate gig since 9/11/2001. That day I was working in the same building I'm now working in. That morning I arrived between the two impacts. The north tower was hit while I was on the subway crossing the East river underground from Brooklyn. On Wall street bits of paper were falling out of the sky; somebody said there was a fire in the World Trade Center—maybe a quarter of a mile away.
Tonight, as I walk west along Wall street, I see the police are heavily armed and armored. The stock exchange is always well guarded now; the surrounding streets a haphazard pedestrian mall cut-off from the rest of Manhattan traffic by "artfully" disguised concrete barriers. This is what they mean by "hardening" a target, I think as I hoof my soft-target-self up the hill that runs from Broad St along the north side of the exchange toward Trinity church where Wall street deadends at Broadway. Now, I'm a block from the subway and two blocks south of yesterday's ground-zero. I go underground and onto the platform to wait for the bomb-filled train to arrive. Nobody checks my bag; there's not a policeman to be seen on the N or R lines tonight. The Rarely and the Never as some call the line—let's hope so.
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,
...
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.)
By 7pm the rush has usually died down enough that I can get a seat and tonight is no different. One car in the 10 or 12 that make up this train. Probably a couple of dozen trains on this line alone. Each car like this full enough of Brooklynites heading home from work in "the city". Maybe one of us thinks he's taking this train to paradise. The rest of us are going to south Brooklyn.
Whitman would have loved the subway. The press of body upon body at rush hour; the body electric on the electrified rails. Of the crowd, for the crowd and by the crowd. It brings us together in that odd, disconnected connection New Yorkers manage with our invisible walls, casual glances and sense of mutual putting up with one another. You could call it tolerance, accommodation, respect or democracy—but only if you didn't live it everyday. Tolerate this!
But tonight what are we feeling? Are we more defensive or less? Is there more eye contact? Are we checking each other out in a different way? How many of you know about the "threat"? How many are travelling in a state of ignorance you would be otherwise ashamed to acknowledge in this know-it-all, ready-for-anything town?
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,
I too had received identity by my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of
my body.
Why New York? We're the worst nightmare of all fundamentalisms and yet we are the fundamental city. Even Sean Hannity, self-aggrandizing as always, calls us "The Greatest City in the World" several times a day everyday on his dumb radio show.
Bin Laden to City: Drop Dead! Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn—we'll be there in a minute—is the second-largest Arab-American neighborhood in the country.
The American political-evangelicals have no glad-tidings or good-news for south Brooklyn. We're too brown, too yellow, too recent and too long-standing. We're democrats and Democrats. We care about what our neighbor does on his stoop and we really do not want to know what she does in her bedroom. Look around you—we're working people. Ride the R train at any hour and you will see people heading to work and heading home from work and they are all uniformly tired. Except on Saturday night; then it's the R train carnivale all night long and we'll sleep when we're dead. Hey, if you were a train conductor and or a motorman you'd be at work already—just like the recruiting poster says.
Next to me a man reads chinese; down the way a russian newspaper hides its reader from view; to my right a woman is reading about Lebanon. Across from me a middle-aged woman watches me looking at the others; our eyes meet and she holds my gaze a little longer than I sense she might have on another night. Who knows? It feels to me like she knows. She looks tired and little bit scared. Is she reassured to think I know too?
I'm looking at my less-than-innocent companions and they're looking back at me, some of them, and I'm angry. The best thing that could happen for George W. Bush tonight would be for these people to die in a terror attack. The best thing that could happen for Osama bin Laden tonight would be for these people to die in a terror attack.
Twelve or fifteen years ago in Bosnia, the Bosnian-Serb Tiger Militia would enter a town where Serbs, Muslims and Croatians lived side by side like so many New Yorkers—you know, tolerating each other. A militiaman would walk up to a Muslim on the street in broad daylight and shoot him or her dead in cold-blood. What do the town-folk do now? Who are you? Are you a townsman? A Serb, a Muslim? You can't be both anymore; not after that. You could be next. Your neighbor is taking his decision, what's yours? You are part of the war now.
How will we react to the next attack? Are you an American, a New Yorker, an African-American? In 2001, we came together. Kids in Bed-Stuy gained new-found, if short-lived, respect for the police because of their sacrifice. I don't feel like we'll react the same way next time.
6
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabbed, blushed, resented, lied, stole, grudged,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was called by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me
approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh
against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never
told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Played the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
You won't see George W. Bush on the subway. Dick Cheney doesn't take the A-train nor does Condoleezza Rice—she doesn't have the shoes for it. Dennis K., Martha and Kenny Boy don't ride the subway either. Nor do the bin Ladens when they are in town.
No, the subway is for the rest of us. You may have seen video of the heavily armed police running about but I haven't seen them. That's not the real subway; it's a prop subway and like the prop city inhabited by men like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Kozlowski and Donald Trump it makes a good backdrop where policeman can pose for news cameras and support the effort to reassure folks in the rest of the country that this time we're prepared. Though funds have not come through for radios that work underground and no plans exist for evacuating a subway train blown up in the tunnel under the East river, preparations are made. Yes, everyone's prepared. The difference is that those of us who ride the R train everyday—though we know we're prepared, we don't know what we're prepared for.
City to bin Laden: fuck you, Osama!
City to Bush: fuck you, George!
City to Whitman: we miss you, Walt!
7
Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you - I laid in my stores
in advance,
I considered long and seriously of you before you were born.
Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for
all you cannot see me?
The poem continues and is, of course, well-worth reading in its entirety.