Login
|
Join PoetrySoup
Home
Submit Poems
Login
Sign Up
Member Home
My Poems
My Quotes
My Profile & Settings
My Inboxes
My Outboxes
Soup Mail
Contest Results/Status
Contests
Poems
Poets
Famous Poems
Famous Poets
Dictionary
Types of Poems
Quotes
Short Stories
Articles
Forum
Blogs
Poem of the Day
New Poems
Resources
Syllable Counter
Anthology
Grammar Check
Greeting Card Maker
Classifieds
Member Area
Member Home
My Profile and Settings
My Poems
My Quotes
My Short Stories
My Articles
My Comments Inboxes
My Comments Outboxes
Soup Mail
Poetry Contests
Contest Results/Status
Followers
Poems of Poets I Follow
Friend Builder
Soup Social
Poetry Forum
New/Upcoming Features
The Wall
Soup Facebook Page
Who is Online
Link to Us
Member Poems
Poems - Top 100 New
Poems - Top 100 All-Time
Poems - Best
Poems - by Topic
Poems - New (All)
Poems - New (PM)
Poems - New by Poet
Poems - Random
Poems - Read
Poems - Unread
Member Poets
Poets - Best New
Poets - New
Poets - Top 100 Most Poems
Poets - Top 100 Most Poems Recent
Poets - Top 100 Community
Poets - Top 100 Contest
Famous Poems
Famous Poems - African American
Famous Poems - Best
Famous Poems - Classical
Famous Poems - English
Famous Poems - Haiku
Famous Poems - Love
Famous Poems - Short
Famous Poems - Top 100
Famous Poets
Famous Poets - Living
Famous Poets - Most Popular
Famous Poets - Top 100
Famous Poets - Best
Famous Poets - Women
Famous Poets - African American
Famous Poets - Beat
Famous Poets - Cinquain
Famous Poets - Classical
Famous Poets - English
Famous Poets - Haiku
Famous Poets - Hindi
Famous Poets - Jewish
Famous Poets - Love
Famous Poets - Metaphysical
Famous Poets - Modern
Famous Poets - Punjabi
Famous Poets - Romantic
Famous Poets - Spanish
Famous Poets - Suicidal
Famous Poets - Urdu
Famous Poets - War
Poetry Resources
Anagrams
Bible
Book Store
Character Counter
Cliché Finder
Poetry Clichés
Common Words
Copyright Information
Grammar
Grammar Checker
Homonym
Homophones
How to Write a Poem
Lyrics
Love Poem Generator
New Poetic Forms
Plagiarism Checker
Poetics
Poetry Art
Publishing
Random Word Generator
Spell Checker
Store
What is Good Poetry?
Word Counter
Email Poem
Your IP Address: 52.14.126.74
From Email:
Required
Email Address Not Valid.
To Email:
Email Address Not Valid.
Required
Subject
Required
Personal Note:
Poem Title:
Poem
The intact facade's now almost black in the rain; all day they've torn at the back of the building, "the oldest concrete structure in New England," the newspaper said. By afternoon, when the backhoe claw appears above three stories of columns and cornices, the crowd beneath their massed umbrellas cheer. Suddenly the stairs seem to climb down themselves, atomized plaster billowing: dust of 1907's rooming house, this year's bake shop and florist's, the ghosts of their signs faint above the windows lined, last week, with loaves and blooms. We love disasters that have nothing to do with us: the metal scoop seems shy, tentative, a Japanese monster tilting its yellow head and considering what to topple next. It's a weekday, and those of us with the leisure to watch are out of work, unemployable or academics, joined by a thirst for watching something fall. All summer, at loose ends, I've read biographies, Wilde and Robert Lowell, and fallen asleep over a fallen hero lurching down a Paris boulevard, talking his way to dinner or a drink, unable to forget the vain and stupid boy he allowed to ruin him. And I dreamed I was Lowell, in a manic flight of failing and ruthless energy, and understood how wrong I was with a passionate exactitude which had to be like his. A month ago, at Saint-Gauden's house, we ran from a startling downpour into coincidence: under a loggia built for performances on the lawn hulked Shaw's monument, splendid in its plaster maquette, the ramrod-straight colonel high above his black troops. We crouched on wet gravel and waited out the squall; the hieratic woman -- a wingless angel? -- floating horizontally above the soldiers, her robe billowing like plaster dust, seemed so far above us, another century's allegorical decor, an afterthought who'd never descend to the purely physical soldiers, the nearly breathing bronze ranks crushed into a terrible compression of perspective, as if the world hurried them into the ditch. "The unreadable," Wilde said, "is what occurs." And when the brutish metal rears above the wall of unglazed windows -- where, in a week, the kids will skateboard in their lovely loops and spray their indecipherable ideograms across the parking lot -- the single standing wall seems Roman, momentarily, an aqueduct, all that's left of something difficult to understand now, something Oscar and Bosie might have posed before, for a photograph. Aqueducts and angels, here on Main, seem merely souvenirs; the gaps where the windows opened once into transients' rooms are pure sky. It's strange how much more beautiful the sky is to us when it's framed by these columned openings someone meant us to take for stone. The enormous, articulate shovel nudges the highest row of moldings and the whole thing wavers as though we'd dreamed it, our black classic, and it topples all at once.
Type the characters you see in the picture
Required