Today's poem is by John Gallaher

Elegy for Brutalist Architecture
        firmitas, utilitas, venustas

I have this picture my birth-mother gave me, or maybe it's birthmother,
or birth mother. Language is under pressure. It's a frozen lake
in late March you have to walk out on, 33 degrees, sun.
It's a picture of my grandmother, Tillie, standing with me
on her porch, right hand on my shoulder. I'm disappearing
into the folds of her housecoat. Bright
                                                            future. Heaven
of other places. The first principle of architecture
is earthquakes. It's the space
between any two things. And then you place a story
there. And then it's the space itself
you hold in your body. Blank of ice. You
and some other you. It's how I was reborn
or how I disappeared. How I blinked.

The second principle of architecture
is this booth we're in at the Edgefield hotel restaurant, talking over
sandwiches and coffee. Story decorated. Attic
story, between "remember" and "forget." That on this porch
in 1968 Tillie has her right hand on my right shoulder.

It has to be invented. That in the third principle of architecture
they bathe you and feed you. You won't remember.

And they know this.

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Copyright © 2023 John Gallaher All rights reserved
from Copper Nickel
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission