FALLING WATER
for Frank Lloyd Wright

1.

That boulder will never squint again
with Kaufman’s dream home
lashed to its back.

And that waterfall —
once a raison d’être for picnics
has a cakewalk debut
spared the gauntlet of critics
who doubt that architecture
must be haunted to affect.
Where cost is no object.

But compromised with camembert
and champagne, these magi
will urge the rebel into a phoenix
scrubbed by underground streams
then rave on about the radiance
of genius mummified by clay.

Though the roofline is flat
the true believer will trump those
who would seize upon any
concession to European fads:
who is to say that clouds
can be ambushed by the linear?

Such glass and unfractured space!
With no dark corners for retreat
surely the master must dine out
to spill his feral impulses
or watch a stain of testosterone
brood to centre stage to encore
his mistress.

But then the sound of falling
water under starlight!
What better signature for those
who can mortgage a sanctuary
beyond reprisal?


2.

Does intellect ever recoil
before inspiration?

It’s youth they want, you insist.
Any doormat can ape the young.
Poets may bet on posthumosity
but there are no retrospectives
for blipped architects.

So the Museum of Fine Art
declared him mort at 62
perforated by one too many wives
cremation in state fait accomplied
by a scad of yellowed sketches —
no second coming for him.

Then, for the Johnson’s Wax HQ,
he dreamt up a forest of concrete
lilypads to arrest a pellucid roof.
Orchestrating light better
than nature, he claimed.
A Beethoven pastorale with vision.

The Pharisees forced to recant:
no Victorian crumbs on his collar
Frank was back — in spades.

3.

He felt better with disciples
around to free-range his discards.
My fellows, he called them, even
the women. No question but they
would pay — and gratefully —
for a pew at his feet.

Eighty now, he could have a hundred
jobs on the go and not miss an angle.
Just can’t get them down fast enough.
The idea and its staging was his —
they were to plant, water, and hoe.

They would have died for him too
though he was too generous to ask.

4.

The Guggenheim was his grandest
symphony. When pretenders in queue
urged him to a faster pitch he bristled.
I’m only ninety-two — surely God can wait!

He got them all offside — the planners,
curators, the artists. It was his attitude
they hated — art on a democratic ramp.
Is architecture to shelter or relegate?

But colour’s nothing without a canvas
and a frame nothing without a focus.
It’s the melody that people remember
not the orchestration, so when a space
comes alive they must find their balance.

In this too Mr Wright was right.
Finally, they had to mourn him
and so they did, scattering
his ashes far out to sea.