In “Room City,” I tried to recreate the experience of drawing a one-point perspective by hand. When you get to a certain point within a perspective, you must make a choice between an exterior or interior space. Are you, for example, depicting a city or a room? This poem shirks that choice and instead opts for both while examining the speaker’s/architect’s ulterior motives. Why this urge to create a new space? Why is the space more convincing if it shows its human traces? A quote from Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck also informs this poem: “a house must be like a small city if it’s to be a real house, a city like a large house if it’s to be a real city.”
So much of life is subtraction, but here, deep within
the layers of trace, we add a point of view to a boundary,
a vanishing point, off-center, and, using our ruler,
two crisp diagonals, radiating toward and away—now
the slow march of feet, secret grid that climbs and scales
the insides and outsides of walls, multiplies and divides
the sky’s chandelier, the floor’s pavers—throw me
a rug and a car, a couch and a tree, a window, the quiet
that walks through a crowded street, and I’ll lead you
to my favorite cafe in the professor’s house where he,
running out of wood, installed different colored doors
on the ceiling—enter, patterns of shade, enter,
sudden erasures of light—more trace—careful, not too perfect,
for perfection has no feeling—remember a slight tremble
to the line is testament to the hand’s breath—desire.
Nicola Fucigna is an Editor-in-Chief for Construction Literary Magazine. She edits and contributes to a column on the poetics of space. Her articles include “Poetry and Architecture,” “Lessons for Architects in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities,” and “Arrival: The Architecture of Future Past.” She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona and an M.Arch from the University of Oregon. She works for Rowell Brokaw Architects in Eugene, Oregon.
