Aircastles

Judith Skillman

What could be pretty

about a castle of air.

May is a song of forgetting.

Why should I be lost

in reverie? In this building

so tall it invades the clouds

like Babylon, each storey crumbles

before it reaches the next.

The gray-green color pleases

as it appears to be more

like More’s utopia.

The alphabet encased in its own

bright cells, the mosque

set like a drill bit into this work

of perspective

that seeds and recedes.

But jagged to the touch,

roundly unsupported, except

where the middle can be seen

opening into peopleless space.

The scaffolding was always

most difficult to see. Color of branches

and sunlight, the fact

of Psyche stealing into bed

to usurp her own cupidity.

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