OCR Text |
Show Odes: San Francisco Bay What vision gripped them?-architects all arrayed squint-eyed into the sunset, into the blare of barges sunk deck-deep with their trade surging diagonal wakes toward shore. Hand-sure they penciled blueprints: the Berkeley Pier's three miles of structure over the unruly bay. Cement-and-hardwood, rebar-and-wire ode to their seersucker genius, nearly Horatian its bravura. For after few salt years of careless maintenance-promenade outmoded, dry-docked ferry, the new bridge cantilevering across the water- scoured down the pilings splintered out; after cranes plucked up the masonry of its watermost extent, unmade two miles and change, leaving the shallows beweired with black posts; when even remnant posts disappear, erode, worn down by water's dogged incessant moil, their fretwork braced no more on the broad glimmering: still will the will remain, still that urge to structure. Who, looking out across such chaos, doesn't try to compose it? Dark the bay, the wine-dark sea and the waste, darker the ocean of fathomless night. |