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Annie Finch

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On Poetry and Architecture

 

Proportion is life measured open by harmony.

It vaults us to notice like atriums, entering

our pillared awareness in footsteps, then building

our spaces with conscious decision. Its mystery

makes earth that our forest looks back for. Its beauty

has felt us repeating, then come to repeat us.

Its answers have carved us like mineral and bent us

in spirals. Its questions have rocked us past symmetry.

 

And, if we have voices that build to a word

and breathe out through poems, it comes to enclose us

by seeding the places we know we inhabit—

(make local, remember, name, touch and are stirred

in, share with those who understand, love, or oppose us

(because they live here, in the place we inhabit,

 

and believe what we have grown wise believing:

that belief, like love, rests on no foundation

but the shapes we know how to make by knowing

how they enclose us))—

 

how they unfold us.

 

 

(First published in Spells:New and Selected Poems)

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