Build, Now, a Monument
No longer satisfied by the way time slips
through his life’s work, the maker
of hourglasses yearns for a change.
He elects to construct a staircase instead.
Rather than grains of sand,
he’ll manufacture one stair after another
to lament every transient second.
Look at it now! It rockets upward, almost vertical,
beginning in his backyard, puncturing
the cloud cover, and everyone speculates
where it will end. It will end
where all ambitions end: in the ether,
where the body ceases, and a story continues.
But for now, it’s a monument.
For now: a defiance, misoneism.
A bridge between
Earth and what Earth cannot touch.
What does he think as he builds?
Mostly he contemplates the work:
the sawdust, the anger, the hammer.
But sometimes he dreams of cars, highways,
of crashes and sequestered wreckage.
Old pain. He had a friend, out there.
There was a highway, a vehicle overturned.
If his friend was here today,
she’d understand this monument.
She liked the sky, country music and caterpillars.
There are four thousand muscles in a caterpillar.
It uses every one of them
to become something other than itself.
Is the body a cocoon? the man wonders.
From the top of the staircase, the life
he left below is almost unrecognizable.
Look at the beagle, yelping in the neighbor’s yard.
The rooftops of the shrinking houses. Everything
getting smaller as his view of the world
expands. The roads marked by petite yellow lines.
Graceland and Grant’s Tomb and whatever’s left
of the Parthenon. All of it is down there.
Things end. But what he can’t comprehend
is how, around those endings, everything else
continues.
Copyright Credit: Matthew Olzmann, "Build, Now, a Monument" from Contradictions in the Design. Copyright © by Matthew Olzmann. Reprinted by permission of Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org
Source: Contradictions in the Design (Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org)