When I lived there a woman appeared at my stoop ruffled as someone pulled from a nightmare. The rope burns were like burning bracelets on her wrists; the blood in her blush gave her cheeks a sad sunset tint. She was from a mill town, a desolate suburb of basements and cookouts, but I let her in gushing, “Okay, okay, okay,” with a sliver of pity. And later when she put her fingers in my mouth, I tasted pepper. Nothing is sure struck with darkness. No one’s grief is ever as profound as your own.

It is perhaps impossible to have a neighborhood without neighbors and a market, but the ghosts believe otherwise. Dust on the theater marquee is undetectable in the twilight. Stand in any district cemetery and there will be a low singing though there will be no singers. The faint stain on the library steps may well be blood, but there will be no corpse. Place your ear to the road and you will hear someone screaming below.

Let us look at the North Shore’s modernity as would a boy sitting on the bottom of the Monongahela, a muddy word that means “soft, collapsing slopes.” Gravity is the only true geography. Rachel Carson, Andy Warhol, Roberto Clemente, no one lives forever here except as bridges under which boys hide from authority and rainfall, the downpour of stadium banter and rebuke. If you fall into the water, you will climb out of the water blacker than you used to be.

After two or three rivers and bus transfers you arrive at a boulevard of dive bars with scarred tabletops. You find patrons with mouths stretching literally ear to ear. They have an absurd number of imperfect teeth and miniature noses. They want to tell you immigrant tales featuring steel, steamships, and orphans. When they invite you to brawl at two a.m. do not refuse. Brawl is merely another beautiful word for dance.

Borders make no sense, but are as familiar and awkward as one body entering another. Imagine a future in which all bridges must be rebuilt and the fundamentals of making an ax from a sharpened stone or making fire have been forgotten—can you make fire or an ax? If you are to live here on out as a bridge, you must never say, “Get off my back.” You must say what the water says, “Everybody sing to me, everybody sing with me,” and sing.