The title promises catastrophe, but the end of the city in this poem arrives as a meeting. At half past three in the morning, "a crowd of solemn representatives" gathers on the docks to discuss "the future / of the city," and what they do is count and divide. The details (Rikers, the Tombs, the boroughs) point to New York, though the poem never names it. Its central idea is that a city exists only as long as it is shared, and that once everyone claims a personal piece, nothing is left to be a city. Worse, the claiming never satisfies anyone: each person is "wanting more than would ever / be given."
The poem's main engine is the list. Its third stanza is one sprawling sentence that keeps adding people: doormen and diplomats, city workers and taxi drivers, accountants and lawyers, then the homeless, the prisoners and "the mafia and all the / drug dealers." The repeated "all the" makes the sentence feel like a crowd still arriving. The list also levels everyone. A tenant with a doorman and an inmate on Rikers sit in the same breath, and the mafia is counted as casually as the small businessmen. Being counted, though, is not the same as getting a share. The word "spoils," which belongs to war and plunder, suggests how this division will go. The poem never tells us who gets what, and that silence is part of its unease.
The speaker sounds like a flat, slightly stunned reporter. There is no rhyme and no regular beat, and the lines are lowercase and loosely punctuated, as if the poem were being said in one long breath. The whole poem has a single full stop, at the end of the stanza where the crowds surround city hall. Line breaks often fall in awkward places, splitting "wall / street brokers" and leaving "the" or "all the" dangling at the end of a line. The reader keeps leaning forward into the next line without ever settling, which suits a scene that never reaches agreement.
The scene is also oddly dreamlike. Nobody is named, and "they" shifts from the few representatives on the docks to "wave after wave of people." The sky "turned bright red and then / purple and then to night," a sunset sequence that makes little sense for a meeting that began in the dead of night. "The city rose out of its sleep" turns the place into a sleeper waking to find itself being carved up. The poem reads like a fable or a bad dream, where logic bends but the feeling is clear.
Small word choices carry a lot. The city is "nearly broke, with broken streets," and the echo of "broke" and "broken" links money and decay. Brokers, professors and heiresses "spun stories," which suggests that the justifications for taking a share are partly invented. Then comes the strangest line, in which they divide "the property / and the air." Air cannot be owned, so the line shows how far the claiming has gone. The grammar slips too: "each took his own / thinking that they each only / wanted a tiny part." The singular and plural tangle, as if the poem cannot decide whether it is describing individuals or a mob. The phrase "somehow belonged to them" is the sharpest in the poem. The "somehow" shows that nobody can explain why they are entitled to their piece, only that they feel they are.
The ending is deliberately deflating. "In the last analysis" is the language of committees and reports, and after all the red and purple sky it brings the poem down to a sober, bureaucratic shrug. There is no explosion and no villain, only people who each want a little more.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not blame bankers or criminals alone. Heiresses and the homeless, professors and prisoners all stand in the same crowd, and everyone is guilty and sympathetic at once. The city dies of private wants adding up, and the poem asks readers to wonder what, in their own city, they would take with them and what they would leave behind.