Coping
(n.) The capping or covering of a wall that protects the parts vulnerable to water damage
1 In our opinion there could be no feeling of complete safety and consequently we recommend that the proposed site be not used for any important structure. (Fallingwater Engineering Report, 1936)
Q:
How are you coping?
A:
Five years after my brother’s death, I audited an architecture class on Frank Lloyd Wright. The professor allowed me to take the class on the condition that I do all of the required work. But I’m a poet, I wrote to the professor. I’ve never built anything before. I purchased graph paper. I took notes. I traced the lines along with the professor’s steady hand in the soft, smeary pencils that Wright preferred. Wright liked to play with confinement and release, I heard on a tour of a Wright house many years later. Like birth, I thought. My brother was born in Oak Park, Illinois, not far from Wright’s home and studio. Three weeks before he died, he and I watched bats taking off from beneath a bridge. (Confinement. Release.)
A:
I came to the class believing that if I could not write about my brother, perhaps I could build something that could carry weight. I may have been searching for a new metaphor, to get away from night-dark fields and twisted metal. I remembered that stanza means room in Italian. Maybe I believed that if I could not cross the threshold of my grief, perhaps I could build one, wall it off in separate rooms, and choose whether or not to enter. How easy it is to say, When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life. Grief became the house in which I live. Yet my brother was an engineer, not an architect. In the book about why buildings fall down, I read, A much better metaphor for a building is the human body. Metaphor should appeal to the senses, I tell my students, because it’s hard to grasp what you cannot sense.
Course Notes p. 1
Like most human bodies, most buildings
have full lives, and then they die.
[Revision]
Bodies have lives.
Human buildings.
Like bodies, full, and then.
Most die.
A:
An engineer and a poet lie beneath a bridge. The poet says, Look how you can see the bats against the sky as an absence of stars. And the engineer says, Flight is only a matter of surface area.
A wing is a part of a building subordinate to the main or
central part of the structure.
In the Prairie Style, most floorplans took on a cruciform
shape, with four wings extending out from the central
hearth, creating a division between public and private
spaces. (How could so many wings give the illusion of flight
while staying so low to the ground?)
[See also: flyover state]
A:
In a poetry workshop, someone asked if the brother in my poem was a metaphor. I thought of the way I tell my students that metaphor is not just decoration for a poem, the way Frank Lloyd Wright once said, A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines. Perhaps the nature of metaphor is in abstraction, in the distance that it creates. The way Wright did not build a replica of a sheaf of wheat, a hollyhock bud, a honeycomb, but an abstraction of their shapes. The way I can write the shape of the thing but not the thing itself.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Organic Architecture
black blood collects in his ear like a teeming hive
but dad notices his hair. he cut it just last week.
i study his neatened neckline and sideburns,
evidence of a recent close shave, as if preparing
for a school dance or a job interview, clipped
a bit too short at the top, all cowlick, expecting
in a week or two it would lie down just right.
Course Notes p. 3
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
PRESERVATION—
maintaining as it is
(if my brother were here)
RESTORATION—
reverting back to its original state
(if we went back in time to my brother)
REHABILITATION—
fixing any flaws or structural damage
(if we could have fixed my brother)
RECONSTRUCTION—
recreating what was destroyed by disaster
(if we could bring my brother back)
[REVISION]—
If I could build a brother,
I would build him differently.
A:
A certain Wright house I knew well fit snugly on a narrow Chicago lot, its roof slung as if shading its eyes, the long low eaves meant to mimic the prairie, though this was the city. A place always knows what it once was—like a person always knows where they are from. For years after my brother’s death, I collected news articles on people who died young and tragically in landlocked states. Prairie Style deaths— boys sucked down into grain silos or swept up by tornadoes or fallen through a frozen pond. The boys I didn’t know, but the landscape I did. The dread of it. How many miles you can look ahead. For how long you see what is coming.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Prairie Style
The way this beach is no good for surfing, riptides swirling the color of salted asphalt.
The way we question the sand and whether it was brought in from somewhere
because of the way the grains skid down the dune as kids turn somersaults from the peak.
The way they never seem to reach the ground, just like the planes passing over this state.
The way the boy was backlit in the noon sun and then gone, the sand giving beneath him.
The way he was sucked down like a finger in fresh cement.
The way they dug him out barely breathing, sand filling his lungs like ballast.
The way this could be called a landlocked kind of drowning.
The way scientists dug up the dune to find a web of roots rotted to nothing.
The way they hypothesized the forest that once towered there had been swallowed up.
The way sand rushed in to fill the space left by decay.
The way a breath can be mistaken for a similar lack.
The way the doctors picked the grit from the boy’s throat grain by grain.
The way the boy lived though they called it impossible.
The way we talk about leaving
even as the parts of us we uproot keep growing back underground.
NOTES
The floorplan is of Wright’s Robie House and was drawn
by me during Professor Mark Keane’s Wrightscape class at
UW–Milwaukee.
The quoted text is from the introduction of Why Buildings Fall
Down by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori (W.W. Norton, 2002),
which is also the book alluded to as “the book on why buildings
fall down.”
Definitions throughout adapted from Merriam-Webster and
Wikipedia.