Reading "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" on a Summer Morning

Reading "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" on a Summer Morning · Howard Nelson In the quiet of the barn loft study I've read the poem again— and the breeze comes through the screen of the big window and lifts the old lace tablecloth hung for a curtain and blows a coolness into my face. Birds are rustling under the eave near my head, beyond the gray beam with its delicate cracks of dryness. The veins in the back of my hand make ridges in the skin— and a spider web trembles from a rafter. It is another clear morning. A shaggy man is sitting alone late at night scratching at a sheet of paper, and like the marks carved twenty thousand years ago on an antler in a cave, which say "someone was alive here," these scratchings are secret messages told to everyone. "The dark threw its patches down upon me also. . . ." He listens to the night, and remembers the flow of the river, and the men and women on the deck, and the curious crown of beams of light his shadow wore on the water, and feels the pull of his words in his chest, and his hand scuffs slowly across the page. The Missouri Review · 57 ...