tell me if this is all true

The Architect’s Widow

Now, you only notice city windows 
when thin light warms behind them, 

shadows gathering in white pleats 
of curtains, foggy as tracing paper, 

their billows breaking the rigid frame. 
This is what he meant by negative 

space: not the domes of the cathedral, 
but the places you stand to see 

their familiar swell. Still, to watch you 
startle at your reflection in the blisters 

of his windows, your shoulders sloped 
— gentle curve of a wingback chair —

the city’s wind snared between girders, 
facades of red brick, the body’s tilt 

in a warp of glass, is to know something 
of the way light distorts the thing it touches. 

Once, he told you that each bend in every 
building has as many names as Rochester’s 

phonebook: fanlight, oculus, loggia — yet, 
no single word for the way rain darkens 

the shingles of the steeple or how the roof’s 
fixed line dovetails a blurred sky.

Brandon Courtney

(Source: boxcarpoetry.com)