Gaudí
Gaudí
His cathedral like a novel
In which everything is
So minutely described
Not even an hour will pass
In seven hundred pages.
His cathedral a young woman
On acid trying to explain how, how…
Children especially love it.
It has to do with colors familiar
From cartoons and the fact that
It is unfinished like everything
In the imagination is.
Guadí himself was almost unknown.
No one could remember
Who gave him permission to build it.
He walked to work amongst men
Paid to sweep the streets clean
With long brooms and old women
On their way to morning mass.
The women frowned at his monstrosity,
Crossing themselves as
They crossed the street,
As if to so much as glance at
It might doom them
To excess, when the wine
They’d always drunk
Was rough stuff but good enough.
One day, crossing the other way,
Distracted by a problem with the spires,
He was struck down by a streetcar.
No one recognized him.
He died in the poverty ward.
They kept working on his cathedral.
They still are.
I heard an American college girl
Tell her friends that
She wanted to go to the Sangria Familia.
She said it seriously.
It wasn’t a pun.
So what if she said it wrong?
Of all the places to go,
She wanted to go there.
And so what if, standing inside it,
Her bare American shoulders
Bathed in Nickelodeon light,
She still didn’t believe in God?
She must have believed
Someone must have.