The Gowanus Canal

Poetry and Bad History

1. In Memory of Robert Hershon (1936-2021)

The ghost of Buddy Scotto weeps 
on Gowanus’ shore, remembering 
bright afternoons here, 
brick-and-cement banks
crumbling, bare.
Wooden pilings leaning scarified and clean.
No barnacles on the hull 
of a half-sunk tug, 
nothing, in fact, coloring 
any nearby surface, no lichen, 
let alone moss, and as for the famous
   Brooklyn tree,
more or less unkillable, 
it's stinky leaves, which should be
    swaying
high above the chain-linked yards 
of the shuttered works—
forget about it.

*

Buddy also remembers the canal after dark. 

Preventing life 
as we, anyway, know it, 
a thick muck rests
maybe twelve feet below the still,
black surface, 
whitened here and there tonight 
by the winking work lights 
securing darkened hulks, those old
   factories
where Buddy's ghost walks weeping.

*

Yeah, that Buddy Scotto.
Inherited the funeral parlor. 
Given name Salvatore, 
a politician, enthusiastic 
about our end of the borough. 
Flirted with running for Congress himself, 
in 'seventy, at forty-two, and backed out
not because, or probably
not only because the Protestants and Jews
then gentrifying, as it was called,
the brownstone neighborhoods, 
as they called them, 
whispered their concerns, 
probably unsubstantiated,
that Buddy was connected.

And no, 
you can't, 
actually, 
Google it. 

But his calling,
Buddy’s true calling,
turned out to be transformation. 
He would, he swore, 
raise the money and organize the clout
to turn a postindustrial flow, 
stopped up at one end, 
hemmed in at the other
twice a day by tidal pushback
(“one of the most polluted waterways in the 
   country,”
says Wikipedia, 
which is saying a lot), 
thick with fecal coliform, 
pathogens lethally concentrated, 
and such a scarcity of oxygen 
that only a weird one-celled organism 
   classified, 
literally, Extremophile can live there: 

he would turn the canal and its environs
into—quoting Buddy now—
into the Venice of Brooklyn.

*

If I'd been a poet, 
I might have been the poet 
of the poisonous, poisoned Gowanus.

2. Not a Poet

The banks of the Gowanus Canal, as many Brooklynites know, have changed drastically and in startling ways from the banks of the Gowanus I knew in my childhood, and in a good part of my adulthood too, as reflected in my poem, above. When I was a kid, there were mornings when you could smell the canal a mile away, which is about where I lived, and while a federal cleanup, underway now for many years, faces major challenges—phase two has begun, with no known end date—I think it’s fair to say that the stench is no longer so bad or so pervasive.

If it were, nothing that’s happened along the canal could possibly have happened.