The Ed and Wilbur
Accords
Wilbur: You’re
more than a horse. You’re a real human
being.
Ed:
Is that supposed to be a compliment?
The bland man who made buildings kept a chatty Palomino,
but seemed himself to have settled
for being just a person. Indeed I can
almost remember
his white-washed, pre-digital, “barn-office” out back
with its city of pencils. Wilbur would have been Wilbur
of erasable 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
platforms, habits or paths, never some maestro
of intense, 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.
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 beast
didn’t make more trouble, in fact. Oh,
once in a while he surfed, danced the go-go, fell for a filly or dialed collect.
But anyone could see he was burning.
Nichols©2004