The bland man who builds houses has an office out back of his home,

The bland man who made buildings kept a chatty Palomino

who mostly refused to settle.

But more on this later. I want to remember

bland man Wilbur right now—though I can’t say I do, much

He certainly seemed to have settled

for being a person. I don't know architects either, but I can almost recollect Wilbur’s

white-washed, pre-digital, “barn-office” out back

with its city of pencils. Wilbur would have been Wilbur

of the washable markers, technical pens and T-squares,

fixed-leg compasses and protractors by Mars.

Wilbur of the usual vast drafting board

and small of course but important

skylight overhead. Not the architect genius of popular belief, however.

As though the crash of heaven were suburbia—

its animal ludicrous, conniving and articulate,

its architect a bit of a fool—Wilbur

was no maker of life in the air, no builder of trustworthy
places to stand on, no cincher of habits and days, orchestrator of repetitious, labyrinthine,

interior embarkations. Wilbur wouldn’t have been the guy
to sizzle up questions about our very bodies.
He wasn’t a thinker into

the cold complexities of comfort, nor of human
fringes and frontiers. Ambits and abuttals. Peripheries, purlieus, confines, brinks. Still,
you have to hand it

to Wilbur. The man had a secret talking animal

and he housed him in his own special place of reason and work.

Ed: an aspiring nonanimal, really, irascible often,

not exactly loveable, but you don’t just get rid of
that. But now I’m thinking Wilbur, in his blandness,

was almost miraculously generous. Provincial and witless,

but also massively hopeful. Ed, really, was the only thing special

in shades-of-gray Wilburland, and Wilbur, to his credit, must have known it.
How astonishing, after all, to let this gabbing aberrant of nature

into his life like practically nothing. A bratty aberrant at that, a gorgeously brushed,

big baby of a horse, though we shouldn’t blame Ed

for being Ed. It’s surprising this horse

didn’t make more trouble, in fact. Oh,

once in a while he surfed, he vacuumed, drove a truck or fell in love.

But anyone could see he wanted out.