Issue 7 - George Ovitt

Here's How We Did It

Quemaremos todas las naves!/Quemaremos la última esencia! --Vallejo

Here’s how we did it: first we set out the tools,

Ax and hammers, crowbar and awl, a book of

Vallejo’s poems and a bucket of blood-red paint.

The house listed in the wind like a broken tree—

We broke apart the roof and let the slate tiles

Shatter on the floors below us, we smashed glass

And tore apart the ancient iron pipes: sewage

Flowed briskly downhill and into the empty street.

The walls were harder—they built things well

In those days, cinder block and plaster, footings

Deep enough to bear the weight of eighty years,

Eight decades of lives shut in or defended—take

Your pick—by mortar and the weight of the past;

But at last the thing fell by itself, worn out perhaps

By the ache of standing upright past the time

When standing upright mattered.  At midnight,

When it was over, we drank a toast to

Broken walls and ruined lives,

And, sitting on the rubble, we read

Vallejo’s elegies into the empty air.

--George Ovitt

Previous Page            Table of Contents                        Next Page