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Center
How did you come How did I come here Now it is ours, how did it come to be In so many presences? Some I know swept from the sea, wind and sea, Took up the right wave in their fins and seal suits, Rode up over the town to this shore Shining and sleek To be caught by a tide As of music, or color, or shape in the heart of the sea. Was it you? Was it you who came out from the sea-floor as lab into lab Weightless, each breath Bubbling to surface, swaying in currents of kelp plants, Came in your cars Freewayed in valleys millions of miles from the shore To converge where the highways converge saying welcome to here, And to where? To tape and percussion, raga computers, Rare texts and components of clay, With the sea down away past the freeways and out of the town To the blockbusting towers of learning and quiet Shades of administering redwood, Azure dome over all like a bellflower And star above star. Did you come Out of borderlands dear to the south Speaking a language Riveran, Nerudan, and saying Aqui está un hombre; my first lesson? And come as Quixote, the man of romance In its new century, tilting At windmill giants of concrete, Slim lance at the ready? Woe unto them That join house to house, that lay field to field Till there be no place that they may be alone In the midst of the earth. Did you come With a handful of questions Leaping like jewels To shock answers, to start Sparks of inquiry into the evening air? I came as a kid From the Midwest all recognize As part of home, To this another Which the salt sea answered in its time And Viscaino mapped his ports upon. You came As concertmaster of the Philharmonic As mayor of Del Mar As reader of magnetic messages in DNA As archivist for the time’s poetry, or PTA, As land-grant scholar Holding his gray moon rocks. What is this that we come to, Its walls and corridors Gaping in space, its north lights Seeking the north, its substance Concrete brushed by the grains of its boards, Its boards reaching extension in all of their lengths In architectural solidity? It is A break in the galaxies of our imagination. It needs our lives To make it live. A building, a dark hole in space, Compact of matter, Draws into it buzzing disinterests, Ideologies. Incomplete being Enters into the dense room, emerges Another, further, Compact of matter, this is the place that we enter, It paints pictures here and plays drums. It turns us around and we emerge Out of old space into the universe. This building Between buildings as between galaxies, Between fields as between flights of fancy, Will reshape our ears and turn us, Our work of art Beating in the breast like a heart. What are we here for? To err, To fail and attempt as terribly as possible, to try Stunts of such magnitude they will lead To disasters of such magnitude they will lead To learnings of such magnitude they will lend Back in enterprise to substance and grace. What learning allows for is the making of error Without fatality. The wandering off, the aberration, Distortion and deviation By which to find again the steady center And moving center. What art allows for is the provisional Enactments of such learning In their forms Of color and line, of mass and energy, of sound And sense Which bulk disaster large, create evil To look it in the eye. To forge Villainies of the wars, to indispose Villainies of petty establishment To make them lead their lives in sound and sense To no good end, that we may see them so. To make mistakes All of our own mistakes Out of the huddle of possibilities Into a color and form which will upbraid them Beyond their being. Give us to err Grandly as possible in this complete Complex of structure, risk a soul Nobly in north light, in cello tone, In action of drastic abandonment, That we return to what we have abandoned And make it whole. Domesticate the brushed Cement and wood marquee, Fracture the corridors, Soften the lights of observation and renew Structural kindness into its gentler shapes. Out of the sea The kelp tangles, out of the south The cities crowd, out of the sky The galaxies emerge in isolation One from another, and the faces here Look one to another in surprise At what has been made. Look at the actual Cliffs and canyons of this place, People and programs, mass and energy Of fact, Look at the possibilities Irradiating all these possibilities. Praise then The arts of law and science as of life The arts of sound and substance as of faith Which claim us here To take, as a building, as a fiction, takes us, Into another frame of space Where we can ponder, celebrate, and reshape Not only what we are, where we are from, But what in the risk and moment of our day We may become.