Nous, and: Architecture

Nous, and: Architecture Noah Warren (bio) Nous 1 He lifts the yellow backhoewith the hoist he’s riggedto the I-beams of his studio;it hangs in its chains like a bee. 2 On long tables, unarticulatedcolumn segments wait to be weldedand planted in the meadow. Like teeth, they’ll growbrown with pollen, black with fog. A decades-old Athena stares into the corner.Her steel breasts and heavy legs barelytacked — the idea of a body, toddlingreproachful from its ersatz frame. [End Page 379] 3 He leans back wincing on the homemade creeperand inches under this used machine.Rust-bound casters keen —his young assistant tightens. He will wrench off the skid plate;drain two trays of tarry oil; swap outplugs, cracked hoses, gummed filters;grease the housings; curse the pump. For a quarter of an hour, though,he just lies on that deal platform,a pocket flashlight clenched in his teeth,testing lightly with his fingertips the dark, intricate landscapea foot above his face. 4 I remember the door banging open,freezing the kitchen.I watch crusts of sleet slide fromthe toes of steel-toed boots to the linoleum. The linoleum is a dingy yellow;likewise the Bakelite countertops.A potbelly stove crackles, mutters. [End Page 380] He microwaves a bowl of carrot soupuntil it bubbles, smothers it with vinegarand grated cheese, shovels it down. He suckson his moustache for a minute then marches out into midday again. 5 In the basement, under the red Bilco doorstwo ricks are tucked, side by side:one for the dried, one for the drying wood.Depleted, filled, each few weeks their roles reverse — so there will come a momentwhen, uncurling from his battered chairthen creaking down the stairs —sensation having faded from my toes as the heat sank deeper in the stove —I’ll crouch squinting in the fusty airnot knowing how to know from which stackI have to take, when the sticks all feel the same. [End Page 381] 6 Seed There waits in a drawer a story that turns,or grates, on words of love the fatherhas become unable, physically, to hear,then to say: a premature and artless urn. 7 (Half light. The sunbreaking from the branches,he staggers naked down the hall to pee. Breathes like a bullfrog. Turns Car Talk upto Deafen as he dozes in the clawfoottub an hour, then dresses.) 8 There waits, in that same drawer, the toya father helped a boy to build, to tide himthrough the shortest days. When the sloop emergedfrom its heel of maple, they named her Pallas, like the real boat, and painted her the same: beetle greenabove the waterline, warm Pompeii red beneath.For that winter — the boy soon grewdispassionate — the two craft were one, [End Page 382] and the arcing passage of the smallerthrough the thin clouds around Block Mountainbrought the boy’s heart to his mouth: as did tragedies,the broken mast, the scars of Dog-Tooth Reef — of which news informed, the mother, accordingto her humor, would sometimes sham a tear. 9 That year our house is finished. Unsaleable,the rock on which some other marriagefoundered, it had lain skeletal through a winter:foundation, frame, plans, and tarps of lumber. Daily my practical parents attacked itwith circular saw and sander and nailgun.They camped in a tent, then the basement.They were so young. Ten years later,nine years old, I watch my father hang its lasttwo doors — thin Z-braced tongue-and-groove —on his bedroom closet. They swing silent and smooth. [End Page 383] 10 He dreaded heat above all else.May rose foaming pink mountain laurel.We ran, sank toes in the pulsing lawn,as he drank by a fan in the basement. By June he packed his tools and fled to a shackin Canada. A tremendous lightness:time fell apart. It pooled beneath the trees we played beneath,it wrapped the house like a cloud. I swam across the big ponds,Meadowbrook and Schoolhouse.Pulling lazily...

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