What radical architecture could defer
its own wish for unmaking?
For in dwelling, a building, like history,
is taken part, is dis-mantled:
the whole is forgotten,
and what once presented itself as impermeable
ceases to be the total object of our fictions.
Consider the deteriorating cathedral
and the sallow walls of its forgotten nave,
whose ovoid apse swells for collapse,
whose columns snap like branches or curl
under the weight of a sinking, sunken ceiling.
The cracks and gaps map that building's un-sealing,
its eventual, inevitable end.
Why must anticipation
always be accompanied by the darker will
to destroy the conditions of its own existence
and all that goes before it?
Vertigo accompanies the unfinished inscription,
as it memory, too, were only a ledge to fall from.
December 1, 2011 (last two lines)
June 13, 2012
