I thought a lot about space today, in relation to Occupy Wall Street. I walked from my house to Zuccotti Park, which I hadn’t done as yet going in that direction though I’ve walked the same route from Manhattan home. I followed Flatbush Avenue all the way to Tillary Street, which meant passing the new sports arena being constructed by Forest City Ratner at Atlantic and Flatbush, with great dislocation to the surrounding community. The ribs of the dome are mostly in place now, and I thought about how different the resulting vista is from the one that I’ve known all my years in Brooklyn, and as I passed Fulton Street a little further down, I remembered protests there organized by FUREE (Families United for Racial and Economic Equality), which has done such great work fighting displacement of both residents and businesses in downtown Brooklyn. I felt a little twinge of self-reproach that I haven’t participated in any actions with FUREE recently. As I proceeded further down Flatbush, I was welcomed (if that is the word) by the garish new residential towers that disport themselves at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, making me even more aware of the sense of dispossession occasioned by New York’s post-9/11 real estate boom: moving about here now, for anyone of modest means who has been a long-time resident, is a perpetual experience of exposure to structures and configurations of space that seem to say, “We were not built for you, and you do not interest us; the fact that you were not consulted about the wisdom of our construction, and could not prevent our coming here to dominate your environment, means that we are a sign of your obsolescence. Therefore, resign yourself to your own insignificance, and if you can’t help objecting to the expectation that you’ll wither away quietly, get out of here right now–in a word, scram!” If I feel this way, though I have a home to live in–and in fact (full disclosure) actually “own” said home–then how does anyone feel whose housing is less secure than that–the person who fears a rental will become unaffordable when the lease is up, or who doesn’t have a lease, or who’s already on the street?

As background to all of this, I thought about a powerful piece by Barbara Ehrenreich called “Throw Them Out with the Trash: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue,” available on Common Dreams at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/23-3 . “What the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover,” writes Ehrenreich, after beginning her essay with a frank meditation on the difficulty of answering the call of nature when roughing it in urban environments, “and homeless people have known all along, is that most ordinary, biologically necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets — not just peeing, but sitting, lying down, and sleeping.” At the same time, I was thinking about an open letter I’d just read, posted on Facebook by a woman of color who has given up on working with an Occupy movement in another city, after encountering a series of enraging obstacles; these included the refusal of white organizers to listen to concerns expressed by people of color about the role of police vis-a-vis the protest, given the experience of police violence in their communities, and callousness (and worse) displayed towards homeless people in the vicinity of the Occupy encampment.

At Zuccotti Park, I read from The Flashboat, Jane Cooper’s last book. I was hugely moved at the ongoing–and, it seemed, renewed–relevance of the title poem, which appears to be the poetic transcription of a dream about danger on an ocean liner, with the speaker being invited/forced to choose whether to accept the traditional protections due “women and children,” or to opt–as she finally does–for a small boat that in the dream-language is known as “the flashboat,” with its promise of “work,/the starry waters.” (And what a chill I got in the middle of that sentence, when I Googled “flashboat” just to make sure that what I’ve always assumed was Jane Cooper’s dream-invention didn’t have an existence in the real world–only to discover that “flash boat” is a term for a type of Cornish rowing skiff.) How the images of melting glaciers–“Below me the grinding of floes: tiny families huddled together/earth-colored”–speak to our condition of vanishing polar ice and rising seas; how uncanny it felt to read the line about “that girl who kneeled by her skyscraper window, falling without a sound through the New York City night” so close to the spot where the burning towers crashed.

My most attentive listener this afternoon was Bob, who came along when I was reading “Threads: Rosa Luxemburg from Prison,” a long three-part poem that depicts the revolutionary leader reading natural history while incarcerated during the Great War. The things that concern me in this blog and in my OWS poetry experiment generally are central to this poem: “my first self belongs to the tomtits [a kind of small bird] more than to our comrades,” Rosa wistfully confesses. Bob stood very close to me in order to hear, almost closer than I was comfortable with, but in time I found that he had no intention of intruding. Bob seemed to be in late middle age, and looked like he’d been doing some hard traveling. He said that the poetry was beautiful and that he was really worried about the exact same thing my sign referred to; with all of the environmental destruction, and nuclear radiation that can’t even be detected by science, he was afraid that the earth might just go up in a flaming blaze one day. He’s new in town, recently arrived from California and with no intention to go back there, he’s looking for a place to live. When he heard I live in Brooklyn, he said he’d been to Brooklyn once himself–he recently walked over the Williamsburg Bridge in the middle of the night. He found some place to rest on a bench over there, he said.