Fear and Architecture

poem #58

photo by the author

Those animals that follow us in dream,
And mean I know not what! But what of those
That hunt us, snuff, stalk us out in life, close
In upon it, belly-down, haunt our scheme
Of building, with shapes of delirium, 
Symbols of death, heraldic, and shadows
Glowering? [...]
- Malcolm Lowery, “Lupus in Fabula”

*

A song that doesn't build the city
Builds the city: it builds it in this way:
An architect dreams and sleeps in a clean, cool house
With golden window frames and white columns
And black sheets and silk clothes,
And pencils bleeding sweetly at a drafting table
And small Egyptian thrones with golden stripes on black
That sit in strange conspiracy inside a walk-in closet.

There is no jackal in his house, except in blurry
Implications smeared with modern art. The architect
Has done away with ibises. Outside
It rains and thunders and the windows hum
With everything they keep away; vibration
Distributed in shudders on the pane, wild hymns
Plucked out of air and flattened into waves,
Homogenized to ripples after all the violence
Of their atavist translation down into the street.

The architect listens for the howl
Of his contemporaries: he must build
A sanctuary for the mangled creatures,
Tall and wide enough to hold their masses,
Grey and geological enough to make their Hells sustainable, 
And wormed sufficiently with chambers
For living and for dying -
Fire fought with fire and hell, hell -
Artificial skulls fashioned from meteors,
Buried in the parceled land, illuminated
From within by flaming circuits running out and back
Into themselves. Whatever is outside
That makes the neighbors scream and shriek
Is that which must be kept away: the water buffalo,
The rain, the feral elegizing lunatics
Who by the hanging, livid skull of midnight
Wander in-between his towers with the dogs
In gusts of smoke and stolen clothes 
And jackhammers at dawn.

A sword of unknown providence hangs upon his wall.

*