Five years ago this was my daily view: the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn, New York. We lived on the Brooklyn side. That's my fire escape in the upper left hand corner, and a great pale dilapidated opera house on the right.

Here is a poem I sketched out during those years.



Urban Soundscapes

1.
That first day in the city
Me fresh from forest living
A tired and lonely night
July, no air conditioning
The tuneful humming bridge and parties,
Traffic, commerce
Did marry into jazz.
And later to learn Ornette Coleman hung
His hat here, composed and played.
In my panic, culture shock I did hear that jazz
If only for a hyper monkey typewriter moment

2.
Flat on my back on the silver roof
Six stories up, level of bridge roadway
Higher still, beyond bridge elbows, Chrysler and Empire State
Clouds ride against the plastic bubble surface
Covering our spiky city sky
They make no sound, but like a calliope
They are ornate decoration, the carousel horses

3.
I notice that jackhammers
on the bridge do sound
like wailing cicadas
locusts in reflective orange and gold
hard hat highway persons
six stories up in traffic.

4.
A camp wedding memory: Loons on our lake before dawn
concert of humanlike voices, echoes
notes of dog and splashing bonfire.
In Brooklyn, Williamsburg, this is sirens
Back and forth across the bridge
European bing-bong siren
Up and down Broadway.

5.
The museum of dead police cars and taxicabs
Has no known translation into music.
The lumberyard forklift back up beep
Insane, monotonous, ignorable.
The garage specializes in fancy car alarms,
Puerto Rican and Dominican flags.
They test alarms and horns in permutation,
Flexing their muscles, roaring their engines
Day and night, territorial,
Like the lake joke, what is the plume
behind a fast-moving speedboat—
Testosterone.