THE HALL OF ARCHITECTURE

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There in the past’s attic, we stopped before

Plinths and entablatures, caryatids

Topped with their vast crowns, a pair of cupids

Bearing small stone wings: all of it hoarded

In that hall whose remnants we ranged among,

Dwarfed by portals and urns, the castings

Of the great doors of a baptistry

Where every panel disgorged its throng.

Even the radiators seemed monumental.

You found such maleness smothering, marble

And bronze being brunted by the will.

I remembered the mills when molten steel

Poured into molds, slag rose like coral reefs,

The scale of that labor now hard to conceive.

But then this was my house of wonders

While growing up—the horse of the sun

Surging from its stone, the horse of the moon

Setting—the great room’s freight and plunder

As natural to me as the cliff wall

Rising along West Run Road, dates and names

Scrawled across its rocks. It was all the same:

The lettered bluff, the museum’s sheer vaults

Carded from their quarry. This was Pittsburgh,

After all. I rode home on welded tracks,

Past open hearths and dark, purling rivers,

Buildings constructed out of granite blocks.

For me the past was an escarpment—

Something silent and shelfed and permanent.

328 SIXTEENTH AVENUE

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Backyard and alley, the buckled brick-weave of the walk.

It’s 1948 and my softly lit face is filled with shadows

Like air-brushed clouds: a dark which in the photographs

Never matches the luster of my grandmother’s patent boots,

Or the black flame of the locust flickering into leaf behind us

Against an opaque white sky. In what would have been

The first spring I could walk through, I’m being posed among

The arbor and climbing vines, the hewn stone of the stair,

Looking back toward a camera that keeps shuttering the air,

Or off beyond it to a world grown suddenly out of reach—

The way the moments turn claustral, frame by frame.

Just outside the photos is the house in which my mother died,

And the house of my memory of her. The honeysuckle

On my grandmother’s dress, which must have been my garden

And flowering bed, will be gone in another autumn, like her,

Though I don’t remember either, or the yard in which

Whoever is taking these snapshots has thought to pose me.

Or why, in each, my eyes are so pale and wary and wide.

TRAPPER BOY, COAL MINE

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Photo by Hine

Whatever the ruse, Hine has managed

To haul his cumbersome, essential tools

Down here to photograph this trapper boy,

Seated in darkness, hundreds of feet

Underground. He must be twelve or so,

Old enough to have survived the breakers—

Those long, tumbling chutes of coal

From which boys snatched shards of slate.

Now his only job is to listen all day long

For coal cars rattling their tracks

And open that door beside him and shut it

Fast, before a down-draft chills the shaft.

Ten hours at a time! No wonder the door

Has been livened like the caves at Lascaux:

The speckled, lyre-shaped birds he’s drawn

Descending upon whatever winged insect

Or seed he’s pictured beneath their beaks.

Perhaps it’s Pentecost he’s imagined

In that flame-traced flocking, the lamp

On his cap throwing shadows off the walls?

Think of him there, face against the door,

The breath at his mouth like a bird,

For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell,

Feeding him on this vision of the word.

Robert Gibb