It definitely doesn't speak in Joe Pesci's voice.

What can I say? Josh inspired me.

Today is the anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. It's my favorite bit of New York architecture, and I get to chug by it every day when my N train crosses its ugly stepsister upriver. And every day (unless I'm being groped by strangers), I admire its fishnetty cables and gothic arches. I love it in early morning light, at nighttime, in fog and in rain. And though it's been coopted for car ads, I like to think of it primarily as the great modernist muse of Hart Crane, Walker Evans (that photo is his from eakinspress.com), Alfred Stieglitz, and even Georgia O'Keefe (before she started painting vaginas... um, I mean flowers, she was bitten by the bridge bug).

Therefore, I give you a poem by the brilliant Hart Crane, in honor of my dearest Brooklyn Bridge (it's from his collection The Bridge... check it out). I could gush on about his use of blank verse, and the Bridge as a focal point for his epic poem on American life (and how that's interesting because he was gay and viewed himself an outsider), but I won't. Read it (aloud to yourself is best... then you can taste the words and meter as well. don't scoff, just try it.) and enjoy it. It sure is pretty.

To Brooklyn Bridge
by Hart Crane

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.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

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.