This is also a poem that considers a way
to think about loss, and it is called "House of Beauty."
One morning, a few years back, I was
driving in Jersey City on the way somewhere winter morning,
and I came across a beauty parlor that
had recently been set afire.
And I knew this because there was a hole in the window.
There were a few little flames licking out.
You could hear in the distance the fire engine siren,
so you know somebody called them.
They were coming.
What could you do?
I kept on driving, but I could not forget about it.
So pretty soon, a line got in my head about it,
and I began to think about the nursery
rhyme, "The House That Jack Built,"
and the form of that amazing rhyme,
which every stanza ends with the same line or a version of it,
and each one is one line longer than the one before.
So hopefully you can sort of hear this stack up.
It's called "House of Beauty."
"Theory of Beauty," rather.
Sorry.
No.
Wrong page.
"House of Beauty."
In Jersey City, on Tonnelle Avenue, the House of Beauty
is burning.
On a Sunday morning in January, under the chilly shadow
of the Pulaski Skyway, the House of Beauty is burning.
Who lobbed the fire bottle through the glass
in among the crèmes and thrones, the helmets and clippers
and combs?
Who set the House of Beauty burning?
In the dark recess beside the sink--
where heads lay back to be laved under the perfected
heads rowed along the walls--
the hopeful photographs of possibility darken,
now that the House of Beauty is burning.
The Skyway beetles in the ringing
cold, trestle arcing the steel river and warehouses, truck
lots, and Indian groceries, a new plume of smoke joining
the others, billow of dark thought rising
from the broken forehead of the House of Beauty.
An emission almost too small to notice just now,
alarm still ringing, the flames new-launched on their project
of ruining an effort at pleasure,
glass jutting like cracked ice in the window frame.
No one inside, the fire department on the way.
All things by nature, wrote Virgil, are ready to get worse.
No surprise then, that the House of Beauty is burning.
So whatever happens, however far these fires
proceed reducing history to powder,
whatever the House of Beauty made is untouchable now.
Nothing can undo so many heads made
lovely or at least acceptable, so much shapelessness
given what are called "permanents,"
though nothing holds a fixed form.
Bring on the flames.
What does it matter if the house is burning?
Propose a new beauty, perennially unhoused.
Neither the lost things, nor the fire itself, but the objects
in their dresses of disaster, anything
clothed in its own passage:
padded vinyl chair burst into smoky tongues,
Lucite helmet sagged to a new version
of its flame, our black bridge, a charred rainbow
on iron legs, two ruby eyes glowering from its crown.
If beauty is burning, what could you save?
The House of Beauty is a house of flames.