Ride Into The Sun

Subway cars clatter out from dark tunnels below Canal and Grand Street in Chinatown, and rise into the late afternoon sun over the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn. The sunlight, stuttered by the shadow of the bridge’s steel struts, lights up faces, details, and gestures inside the cars, and isolates New Yorkers in rare moments of unguarded reverie. In these images of passengers high over the river between two boroughs, between work and home, I see the same people, “eyes dazzled by shimmering tracks of beams,” Walt Whitman described in his 1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” as he passed over the same waters.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.