Frank Lloyd Wright

designed buildings with elements that evoked a sense of anticipation in moving from room to room— corridors with low ceilings and slender passageways opening into

large, airy spaces with enormous features and high ceilings, to him evoking thusly a sense of freedom and unbound wonder— a principle he would term “compression and release.”

Strange, then, despite having died in ‘fifty-nine, his hand apparently still busy drafting the contours of this life, dark years opening into grander eras, sixty years later.

Perhaps this poem, rising in smoke and ash, will cause him to imagine a new design, one that rejects the catastrophes—compression— and emphatically embraces God’s conclusion—release.