Poem of the Week | May 06, 2024

“from Elam House (Austin, Minnesota)” by G.C. Waldrep is our Poem of the Week.

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021); and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, forthcoming 2024). Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Yale Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University.
 

from Elam House (Austin, Minnesota)

Robins engaged in some roughhousing
in the yard, then
crashing one, two, three
into the enormous plate-glass windows
Wright thought
should accommodate
this world (& presumably any other).

I observe one,
stunned, panting on the grass, a wing
held out as if broken.

I am a flame & you are a canticle,
is what I tell it. I whisper these words.

Soon winter will know both our bodies
& something else, that
something only winter knows—

that something
Wright intended us to
watch for, through the long afternoons.

*
 
Prairie light, a marble birds fly through.

It is as if
we were descending
through levels of grief, grief, any grief.
We were stepping
down,

to where the sculptures were archived.

See, this one, a hive of bees
held upside down
by two children in ancient-looking tunics:

is this the death you dreamed about?

No, we say.
(We are sorry. Genuinely apologetic.)

Nor this one of Charon
on his break, dealing out solitaire
upon a marble blanket, its rucked folds
tastefully rendered.

Nor this one of Cerberus
in his cage in the decrepit marketplace.

We can hear the sparrows squawking
in the chimney, they don’t stop,

they aren’t done telling
their version of this or some other story
which they have cribbed
from Hesiod.

They know the names for spring storms.
 
*
 
Everything is made of light, even the light
(seems to be the idea, here)—

& small dark rooms used only for sleeping.

Author’s Note

“Elam House” is a serial poem, a meditation not on, but within Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. Wright the man is problematic (to put it mildly), but the architecture is something else: a form, perhaps a meta-vocabulary that, like the Gothic architecture of Christian churches in the Middle Ages, attempts to point towards something beyond itself, something that is on its own terms invisible and perhaps unspeakable. It’s also infamous for its bird-killing plate glass and leaky roofs. I’m interested in the unspeakable-ness of this “something,” which is definitely (perhaps definitively) secular and yet also somehow transcendent. I’m also interested in what it means to “dwell.”

This particular house was built in 1951 in Wright’s late “Usonian” style, and I got to stay in it for a few days and nights in November 2020. http://theelamhouse.com/

The archive of sculptures in the second poem has a debt to Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi.