There's wide, white, casual grace
Beneath the international concrete;
The decorated walls
Are shapeless under shapes and movement.
Looking out from fronts all wide and open
The sky curves down behind the greying glass.
The massive, finny tubes behind
Utterly refuse to impute motion.
Yet soon they start --- and with the shift
They suck the windows outward into space,
The potential for departure is so great;
And when they leave their pointing is so sharp,
The upward ramp so straight,
The range is infinite.
In coming here I saw the darker brick,
Stained with black and daubed with white,
The desecrated, decimated walls
That look like they are roughed to silence,
Tethered in to shoddy earth.
Rain danced here, collected, though the occupants
Had gone to see some other sight.
Shot to sunward, soaring south,
A huge and dirty vista rearward spans the sky,
The desolated walls.
April 1991