I have passed this place once in the dead of night.
It looked something like a wedding cake under floodlights.

But you cannot trust your memory of the night here
where morning conversation revolves around last night's violence
rather than water coolers or coffee makers.
Poverty is ever-present, a crime perpetrated by society
consumed with preservation of structure, not life.

All along this Greek Revival masterpiece cocooned in scaffolding
masons swarm over once-stately brick columns
in thin cotton t's usually worn under dress shirts
by men belonging to the air-conditioned classes.
White hard hats bob as labourers bend to their work,
skillful trowels darting from mortar bucket to brick.
Tuck-pointing in Kentuckiana July is not for the weak.

The workers turn their sweat-slicked faces outward
to a freak breeze that eddies in the tiers of piazzas.
It carries the scent of baked river mud and exhaust,
and it is not a comfort, though they remain grateful.

The white noise of the interstate is all-pervading
though dampened by the particulate-thick air
that shrouds the flood basin and blue-distant Knobs
as if this place were already dead instead of dying.

07/19/2006

Author's Note: Day three of the One Week challenge. I started out this morning intending to write about the interpersonal dynamics at work, but while I was trying to observe my eyes were continually drawn to the window. Right outside our building, the restoration of the old Marine Hospital in Louisville, KY is well underway. (www.marinehospital.org) I was watching closely because I need to tuckpoint my chimney this fall. And I know I've read the term "blue-distant" in a work of poetry before, but I can't recall where.

Posted on 07/20/2006
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