Caveat: Poem #1692 “Memoirs of the Architect”

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-> . . . )  Memoirs of the Architect ? {Post title}
When the calico cat on the couch fades
in the slanted rays of the wintersun
And when the streets outside the window
reach not for home but for their origins
Gentle, gentle, do my tears come.
Without the calculus of my memory to guide
those tears
Without the nurture of my once heroic
imaginings
Quiet, quiet, the pain slips heavily.
Toward anger                .    Time
the                            .        out
Knife                .            of
slips                            time
home.                    lost,
Cannot,
for whatever reason,
That these viscous drops of blood are mine.
And so bloodied a knife in my trembling
hand
Call me to mind,
A japanese garden I once
saw in a photograph which I perceived
with an ambition to become an architect.
A designer of my struggling end.
Little pebbles, little pebbles
meaning
.    for
.            nought
Quiet    .
11/17/83 JARED
There's no eagerness here.
Nor will it ever come to pass
But in the thick, timid soul
of the non-architect.
There.
It is irremediable.  ( . . . ->

– a free-form poem, which I wrote in the Fall of 1983 – in mid-November – the evidence is right in the text, for this one. Back around 2010, I posted this under my “retroblogging” category (at the appropriate date), but I’ve thought to occasionally include these ancient efforts in my “daily poem” category so that they will eventually be included in a book. This poem appears to commemorate the exact moment in my youth when I gave up my childhood dream of becoming an architect. I’m not sure why I gave up that dream – it seems to have been largely a function of lack-of-self-confidence and laziness.
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One comment

  1. Bob Gehrenbeck

    I think this is a strong poem! But I question the last line of your commentary. I remember you saying at the time that you decided not to become an architect because there was too much non-artistic drafting involved, and that you expected the career (or at least the first steps of it) would end up being rather tedious. I expect you were right. I think teaching has been a better career for you–frustrating and exhausting, yes, but not tedious.

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