Sonnet Written in the Manner of the Color Blue
To Garbage
Slip Inside This House
Strike
The Ox Cart
Xanadu
Sonnet Written in the Manner of the Color Blue
Jeanette squats on a moss-sick jetty lens-
in-hand, senses scanning blue peace, a light
which seems to us tranquil as it limps stone
margins. Photography’s not hard: you just wait
out the baroque structures of the cosmos,
hot seas drumming the center of oil-stacked
planets, sweet and stagnant plumes to shroud
the smokers. And other, silk architectures,
creatures that swarm and multiply in a droplet
Jeanette shoots and breaks down into smaller
and sharper elements, arranges in mineral
patterns. Water doesn’t travel, but waves
imprint a blank organ outside her
body, clatter where a surfer bobbed and fell.
you gather in your arms
and place in its bin, its boundary
it has spent enough time
sleeping at your house, one night too long
you pull it carefully out of the square so
you don’t lose any
walk it through the door, lay it down
kneel beside it lacing your boots, the nice ones
wool socks with no holes
the robe you pretend is a winter
coat hung around your shoulders
takeout cartons, orange peels
coffee grounds (grinds?)
old books in good to very good condition
except the cover’s bent in a way
you don’t like or there’s paint on the edge
you and your garbage, a waltz
down the steps in moonlight
you feel more alive in the quiet
where you hear bugs chirp
here you is us, you is everyone
all of Bloomfield asleep, red ring around
the moon, tiger stripe clouds across
the moon no longer exist
moment to moment in a way that remembers
the stripes on your stuffed tiger Bruno
riddled with silverfish, put out on the curb
for strangers, neighborhood kids swimming toward
the bin’s lid lifted gently open to moonlight and all
the other garbages you loved
before they became garbage, surfaces reflecting
phosphorescent use-shattered plastic, synthetic
fractaled light drawing your eye away
and back away and back
home again, you poor creature
rolling over and over stuck in time
We have embraced this project because it concerns the dimensions of people.
It is a good exercise for designers at this time of outlandish construction
to be confronted with the dimensions of people.
Being foreign, we have observed respectfully the human dimension
but also we know that the crucial thing in building small
is also to build tall.
In this house, two enclosed staircases lead to a terrace.
The only light in them comes through small holes that make it possible
to look out and capture the feeling of being mailed in a box,
watching the world through airholes.
A bamboo wall obscures the height of the house.
You can look out when winds pull bamboo.
*
The Colony House is a cylinder surrounded by columns of purple noise—
a simple house with many columns that make it appear as a monument.
This is what all existing Colony Houses look like, with their people adding
and adding over the years.
One gave her house a copper roof because she thinks of Vancouver,
a city of copper roofs.
One installed solar paneling after a period of forgetting
to better behold Ra.
It is a small challenge to design a building that is small in size
without making it small in scale.
Inside we place a loveseat in the middle, so that two people can be
together when they feel like it, and a chair at either end, for when they want
to be alone.
*
Gravity, lightness, two cubes.
The one on the ground is black and wooden. The one on top is silver
and translucent so one can see trees and scars of leaves through it.
Together, they form the frame of a space that contains what is necessary.
There is a stairway to the roof and a bed.
The mattress is made of moss from Peru.
It is important for designers to build houses living people feel good in.
*
The true nature of our nature is that of another nature.
The house becomes a calendar collecting the passing of time, registering
the dilation of time during the years of a lifespan.
A child invites an adult to her playing in her room at her size.
Parent and child enter the same room through two different doors,
a small one and a large one.
A girl takes her first steps with the help of a miniature lawnmower.
The house is built around these familiar movements of time passing: wrapping furniture in plastic, the swapping of paneled screens.
The house is a miniature element in a bonsai landscape; it is a stone rippling
an artificial landscape of sand.
You can observe it and let your mind go.
*
The design is inspired by the concept, Colony House, with its enclosure creating
a frame for the meeting of earth and heaven,
expressed here as clover and weather.
Ten oak columns, a plate of sandblasted glass, a steel gate, an enclosure
with flags of sailcloth create perspective for the entrance to the staging area.
The oak columns curve out of the Earth like ribs, in an earthly primeval expression.
The double curvature of the columns creates perspective as you are moved
through the park.
The sailcloth with Danish icons add to the perspective by their placement
in a traditional prayer flag pattern.
The steel gate creates the border between inside and outside.
It doesn’t look like a gate, but you know what it tells you to do next.
A workweek of zero hours: this is our right and demand
Flowing holy as a stream
From its source
A signal from the source has announced that
Whatever we make we make / We make whatever we make
That’s plenty
Why kill ourselves for some pig boss
Laid out on wet grass blades, arms bent toward the ark
When we kill ourselves it will be for joy
Such great amounts of joy
when the ox cart comes for me
pin this poem to my collar
with calm assurance, as it was written
a set of directions into the garden’s blooms
upon blooming, the workers who have
already finished commuting
by ox cart, eyes still and incandescent
scratched by shallow stars
fixed to the point in a distance
past your shoulder
that by rote
hoof after hoof
insists and bends me
back into history
East Rutherford
It’s already open
by the time you notice it.
The bonded gates,
paved marsh, civic permissions
issued from nobody’s point of view,
for something else’s sake.
A newly-piled mountain appears
to be smoking, transforming
into yellow fog
lifted off its surface.
Yellow light drapes the stacks,
drags the long side of the sheds.
Your parents walk toward a silver figurine
with all the other parents.
James Capozzi is the author of the collections Devious Sentiments and Country Album, which won the New Measure Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New Republic, Chicago Review, Blackbox Manifold, and elsewhere.
