A building has at least two lives – the one imagined by its maker
and the life it lives afterward – and they are never the same.
– Rem Koolhaas
Some never knew of the secret stair, smooth, cool
caracol of white cantera, winding out of sight
complicit in the house built in another era
for people who carried other burdens in and out
the front door, supplies and groceries
through the back, who lived with contradictions
and lies that spilled from cupboards, overflowed
sinks, loves steamed and ironed, folded and stored
for the season, beds warmed with heated bricks,
coal fire soot-staining tapestries hung to insulate
the walls, muffle the ricochet of voices off hard
surfaces, a thing of the past, those bricks, replaced
by a hot water bottle and later, the heat from the
spouse no longer expected to sleep down the hall.
This body, pulled from another, no longer matches
anyone’s imagination. The everyday, every house
on the block, your town and mine, every person
ever born-ness strips miracle from the mundane.
I was formed without my asking, cared for until
my bones and sinews, organs and limbs, brain and
mind could sustain me outside the warm lean-to
that was my mother’s body.
I watched three brown-black foals, coats shiny
and slick, twelve knobby legs embedded in those
of the mares, who were closing in slowly
Uninvited into the fold, I crept closer, captivated
by what, on that hilltop, remained marvel. A whinny
call and response arose between advancing sires,
shoulders shuddering the new perimeter,
eyes alert, mirroring back the image of one
who’d ventured too far from her herd.
There, on the Cerro de la Crucita, life’s continuous
rebirth, its spiral trail formed by footfall,
innumerable predecessors. I descended the living
side of the cantera quarry, made my way back
to the house built for someone else. I will never
know what Maker would put a stair just here,
nor how to count a mountain’s lives.
So beautiful!