This carriage house, two-storied, brick, and topped
with soft-red tiles festooned with spiders’ webs,
boasts to me, ‘For centuries I have stopped
the rains and winds, and known that both have ebbs.’
We humans, it says, know but one phase: floods.
We call it ‘life’ and think no ebbs exist;
but buildings, at least old ones, know that buds
must also wither — and always persist.
The carriage house, who learned from its own bricks,
as they learned from their water, straw, and clay,
assures me no life forms are monostichs,
and all of them, and we, forever play:
‘As long as time spins space, and space spends time,
we stand and fall and stand again and climb.’