.jpg)
The difference between girders and beams
floods
the difference with lavender and yellow light
The differences between lavender and yellow light
deepen into the deep blue of blueprints
*
Streets and buildings empty of people but full of stone, garbage, animals, asphalt, cars, rats, pigeons, squirrels, cockroaches, souvenirs, fleas, mice, lice, people, mites, lights, silverfish, Sleep.
*
When J was a girl he was already forming architectures, investigating homes. We go from room to room not thinking our path is also something made. How many resources a single-family home reserves. How much a family makes—not just in the money sense. Should homes be more or less like factories. It’s difficult to place the cadence now that it’s faded; this room can’t mean what a larger room would mean. Recharged, a vision of building rubbing against his sky.
*
How high
How far
The plume of steam
Of bats
Of smoke
Like sails
The flight that harbors
*
Blueprints are blue because someone coated the paper with a solution of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferrocyanide. Strong light converts exposed areas to insoluble blue ferric ferrocyanide—Prussian Blue. Someone else washes the soluble chemicals off with water, leaving a light-stable print. Or, blueprints are blue because for almost a century blueprint was the only low-cost process for copying drawings. J understands transformations that do nothing to change what’s essential. Buildings—elevations—fill and lift. Hinges, paper feathers, reveal the turbulent peaceful truth about what’s essential and there, like the present, billowing.
*
Take notice of the windows.
Take more. Not empty.
Empty of value.
Thrilling with fear of passionate arson.
A rag-musty assemblage.
A busy, temporary kitchen.
A declaration of grandeur.
Plaster dust settles in the shape of A) a permit / B) permission.
It’s when he tries to uncramp, to louver, he feels just how down his arms have been.
*
Say, “Vibrant,” say, “Eviction,” say, “Future.” All of these stray straw men-dogs, easy to blame or believe; say, “Commerce,” say, “Profit,” “Profit from,” “Nonprofit,” eat sauerkraut in “Punk houses.” Bacterial abundance, conjunction and fermentation. Say, “Vibrant,” again, say, “Thriving.” Jars glow and cool. Worms wriggle red in dark
newspaper. Changing weather balloons, silvery copy of Sleep who will float down and cover all of us, however vigorously we change, it can’t be the reason; say, “Thermal,” “Solar,” “Intestinal flora,” “Graywater,” campfires in our delicate structures, our giant catastrophic heaps.
*
Enormously expensive public sculpture made of
tongue-clickings and head-shakings
Plaster saints of money-luck in the windows of
botanicas (“Plants and Religious Goods”)
A man reposed under the giant abstraction of
whatever that thing is called in a still
because it offers shade to him, his chair and book
in use that’s living and resolute
*
Now the building, black on black, dark gray on dark brown, flat disuse on iron echoes and shadows, high and wrought and die-cut, shrinking his presence. He got a late start. He follows a trail of instructions and short candles up past the old dynamos and vaults, cavernous, massive, flickering, looming, to where his surprise lover sits, to scale, in the lighted center of the floor. Overhead, vastness, equally welcome.
