i got much more from some charts of the sea i obtained in copenhagen—from these i could measure the distances & for a judgment of heights
Jørn Utzon
1. concrete primal naked forms—
the anti-constructs of
cranes
stooping
low over the quays—
theme &
variation—
the harbour's in-
violate curve
de-scribing
a law of
simultaneous contrast / in sections of
scaffolded light

2. . . . c.1970 le repos
du modèle
(vivisection of
the nude, industrial:
sub-
cutaneous geometries
proliferate
towards incompletion)
sur cette verge
terrestre
like an immovable sphinx
absorbed
in its own enigma

3. "a sail surmounts the steep slope
of this
white profile"


4. fluid mechanism of a frame &
wave-motion
writes / into the littoral, parabolic . . .
a crisis versus: angular inclined forms
lit from behind, hard and solid
"correspondences"
which nevertheless remain detached
from any "natural history"
emblematic
of what, there, barely remains /
no longer remains

5. withdrawn beneath its shell the sea
enormous & delicate
like a soprano—allegory of silences, of
being silenced
"words that have no (other) past" . . .
re-inforced concrete surfaces arranged along
an axis of the visible / invisible—
vertiginous
zone of gravitation (the weight
of hollow sentiment
falling in sculptured folds about the spectral
body) ciphered
in fake notations of
perspective, an eyelid
caught mid-beat & dark iris looking out
through a haze
of rain on discloured wave-forms

6. in the sky its reflection had become "overcast"
ambivalence masking the arduous futility
human-animal-skeletal abstraction
or paradigm for representing death? each of its veils
caught in the freeze-frame of involuntary
memory-mockingly fatalistic
as the ever arched backs of approaching waves
like endlessly repeated question marks
& always en retrait(e)
from that impossible traverse-rigor mortic
in the too literal gaze of conscientious on-lookers