Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral

—the poles still tarry, flimsy; the ferry terminus

with its walledup doors wan doorshapes

on eroded sills. Downstream, the strutwork

of the Williamsburg cable tower

threw its cool shadow half a mile inland

over tarpaper seams, gantried water butts

and splintery tenement cornices milled

with acanthus and classical grasses

of nineteenth-century dream-slum fantasy.

We could see, from our rooftops, the endspan

float its ant-threads of traffic

to the granite salients of the anchorage,

and through its strands on the west

the Financial District's watery silhouettes.

But it was our own foundations, crumbling

in the sandy soil, that made us protest

the drill rigs sounding for a wider bridge ramp

to funnel the airport traffic over us

into Manhattan. "Construction tremors

will weaken our buildings": from the over-roosted

tenements clinging near the anchorage

flew manuscript lists of signatures, block-groups'

painfully Englished petitions. But City Hall

adoze, sleep-feeding, just flooded us...