Jamie Brown has been a homemaker and stay-at-home parent to two young children, an electrician, handyman, short-order cook, boat ramp operator, assistant manager of a bowling alley, a dispute resolution specialist and Public Affairs Officer for the BBB, then attended American University’s MFA Program, working in poetry with Henry Taylor, Linda Pastan, and Myra Sklarew and on fiction with Frank Conroy, Terry McMillan, and James Alan McPherson. He subsequently taught as an adjunct college professor at George Washington University for over a dozen years and taught the first-ever creative writing workshop at the Smithsonian Institution, a ten week practicum in poetic forms.
The Architect Who Sought to Do Away with Walls
“The only reason we need walls is to hold the goddamn roof up…
if we could only do away with walls…”
– William T. Rohe, Architect
The dew gathers most where the morning sun
paints the pale spring grass yellow, the artist
unseen, having left moments before you
stumbled on his whereabouts. An old friend,
gone too soon, his presence there on social
media a series of footprints you
do not now so much care to retrace, though
if had he still been among the living
what fond memories you two might have shared –
all those meals in Mediterranean
harbors, the farm-fresh horiatiki,
the cheese, and a bottle of Ouzo on
the table, the tangible sea air on
the deck of the hydrofoil, or walking
about Athens, the conversation on
the plaka Kennedy still going, an
endless dialogue broken only by
the intervening dozen years, picked up
and continued as though without any
interruption, conversation about
the country he once had said he had been
glad to leave behind, but then, there, had had
an eager ear for any news of the old
neighborhood, who had died, whose kids had
grown and wed, whether the old bakery
was still there, which bars, and what had happened
to our old crowd of poker-playing pals,
neighbors and friends with whom he had failed to
keep up correspondence, myself among
them, as he moved from Athens to Crete,
to Santorini, back to Athens, then
Crete again, and Aegina, and then you think of all
of all the architectural renderings
he’d left behind, unfinished, having lost
interest in them, sketches of buildings in
some mythic future world where walls were no
longer needed, and, after he’d left his
draftsman’s life behind, his drawing table,
the one he’d suspended by chains from the
ceiling so it seemed to float as he leaned
in on it to draw, but like the chains in
Polyphemus’ cave, had left behind like
the old neighborhood he’d waved farewell to,
moving his family to Athens, Greece all
those years ago, the paintings he’d started
making revealed his focused interest in
the mastery of so many different
styles it is no wonder that, exact and
craftsman-like though they obviously are,
his own style had not yet emerged, no one
technique, no single medium had come
to dominate. Rather, his life was his
true art, and who can swear that his ever-
reliable eye for design and craft
had ever failed or disappointed him?
Praxiteles had sculpted young men at
the height of their beauty, but the rugged
chin and solid features of a mature
man were perhaps beyond his craft or ken,
yet the former architect turned artist
had a face and features chiseled from a
more durable albeit softer stone.
He was a man whose mortal tissues could
not last – none of us will last – was the sort
of person you only needed to meet
a single time in order to form an
indelible impression of; to be –
to have been – his friend was a gift of in-
estimable value. And now he’s gone.
Even unseen for twenty-five years he
was a constant presence somehow in my
contemporaneous experience,
and I was always made happy thinking
of him in the present tense, believing,
wanting to believe that he was still out
there, alive somewhere in the Aegean,
like Poseidon, holding court in the
world of design and ideas. But now
I must move him and all those memories
recalled from the present tense to the past.
Αλίμονο, αλίμονο! . . . και εσύ
Απόλλωνα, Απόλλωνα! *
* Alimono, alimono! . . . kai esý Apóllona, Apóllona!
“Oh, woe, oh woe! . . . and thou, Apollo Apollo!”
— Aeschylus, ‘Agamamnon”
Note:
William T. Rohe designed the National Particle Accelerator (FermiLab) headquarters building in Batavia Illinois.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fermilab_Robert_Rathbun_Wilson_Hall_2011.jpg (exterior)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Interior_of_Fermi_Lab_Wilson_Hall.JPG (interior)
For other contributions by Jamie Brown, please follow the link below:
Poetry in this post: © Jamie Brown
Published with the permission of Jamie Brown