Intelligence
Wild Borough
Waterfront blushes, it’s time to leave. Low tide moves across the floor. The city opens one puncture more. Earlier a skylight of day blue and tissue moon, metronomic mast of tethered
sailboat. Energy captivates the space, shapes my feet today when last Friday, high tide, this flat bottom boat was as solid as a foundation. Last day visiting Lehigh 79 Railroad Barge
docked in Red Hook in a fresh, shivery April. I need the light for when I walk on Mill Street, a fenced sidewalk with a traffic light and public service posters —What’s good Brooklyn?—
under the BQE, past a gas station, the church where Al Capone got married, and the subway garden with its individual plots above rumbling tunnels, but I linger for persimmons and greys,
tints of thistle, slippery blue, yolk, the doors on every side open to the shifting water. The captain and his wife visit with their daughter and her mate, talk about pizza toppings. The daughter who
used to ride bikes with her sister inside the barge, looping past the microwave and the old ship gauges, salvaged propellers, the father who gave them separate spaces on the roof with walkie-
talkies as they grew in and out of distances. I pack my journals, pen, and water-soluble pencils. And what’s that sound like metal scraping metal? Wing of the walkway flexing in wind? Almost
like the intake of breath on the little vaults of a harmonica. But no, it is a goose I hear speaking out in the briefly brightening, darkening harbor free of traffic, by the wild borough’s bank.