mouth full of stones

The geography chapter in John Kiernan's The Natural History of New York is short and deals little with Brooklyn, but nevertheless it took me deeper than I usually go. The day I read it I found it particularly pleasant to consider the strata whose dips and lifts shape the city, to find lackluster sweetness in the massive solidity of the Fordham Gneiss, (1 billion years old), the Schist whose curvature under Manhattan resembles a spine supporting the highrises of Midtown and the financial district, and the less significant Inwood Dolomite, which I'm sure is not named after pain even if its name rings of the word dolor.

Where the schist which glistens with flecks of muscovite plunges down hundreds of feet on the North side of Washington Square Manhattan gets something like an extensive low back, the waist running East West along Canal, where once the East River and Hudson ran together when waters were high, breaking the narrow island in two. Back in the days of the bowerij and before, Soho and Chinatown were a marshy mass of grasslands and rivulets and springs, and who knows what creatures grew fat on its verdure. When the Canal was built in the early 1800s to make the region easier to trundle, and to drain the contaminated kolch pond, the engineers lined it with trees and picketed it with N-S bridges. Later the canal was bricked over to make the street, encasing the crosstown waters in sewers. It's no surprise that the only ducks to be found in the vicinity in these days are Peking.

I like to think that the impulses expressed in art made in the area pull a bit of the lost soil-souled freedom through the cement, that the sewers vent a waft of the city's ungirdled body unfolding in the dreams of the hungry. It seems that from beneath the asphalt glacier some sense a lump as deep and dark as the egg-sized Almandine garnet brought forth when the will of man undercut the river with an artery running from the Battery to Brooklyn. Even in the smallest remaining patch of ground, littered with the inevitable gifts of an old mattress and boxspring, tire, can of paint, heroin bag or wind twisted umbrella, and all the rest of the wreck, some airborne joy shivers and searches for form.