"When we build, let us think that we build forever...." ~ John Ruskin, for The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) "The beauty of a place is welded into us..." ~ Romeo Oriogun Mountains, too, are architecture. The highest ones hold centuries' of sediment and rock, handprints of those who carved roads and resting places. Octaves of fiddlehead fern, papery trumpet flowers; trees from which revolutionaries belled their bodies in the wake of cannon fire and shipwreck. There's a city in the midwest and a tower overlooking a river, its walls studded with stones from distant parts of the world. One carries the bloom of blood spatter, like other stones from a beach in Corregidor with a view of Caballo island. Another comes from the ruins of Cuartel de Santa Lucia, turned barracks in an old war. For what do we turn such fragments into monuments that catch afternoon light bouncing off the water? When I came here, I thought I could shield part of myself from the disembodiments wrought by exile— fold it in a bit of cloth or a box, keep it from conscription into the kind of labor demanding exchange of what tenderness remains, for these mirages of flint and steel.
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