Creepy, Stately: 2015 and the Ode On Exile

Even in a civilized country, the ten years following a major recession are always difficult. Resources can be scarce, and people can be scarce, too. As of the mid-Teens, I found myself in a version of Conshohocken which could only be described as ghostly. What I was seeing, on a day-to-day level, could be, in a way or manner not appropriate to be expressed here, unspeakably gross and carnal. Yet the architecture in Conshy, the buildings, effortlessly dominate the landscape, like Calvary Episcopal, which appears in the Exile Ode, and is here shown. The cumulative effect of all the recessional horror and desolation, co-mingling with the sublime buildings which dominate Fayette Street, Conshohocken's main thoroughfare, I perceived to be Gothic, and imposing. In the year 2015, I didn't write much new poetry; but to again assay the Keatsian odal form precisely, as I had done with On Love (and not the Ode On Jazz), seemed germane, between absorbing the buildings on one side and a sense of hollowed-out malevolence from other sources on the other. I happened to write the Ode On Exile in one sitting, on the afternoon of June 5; and this one didn't need much revision. If I perceived myself to be an exile in 2015, it was certainly from Logan Square and Philadelphia; as a suburb, Conshohocken is very distinctly itself, and nothing like Philadelphia at all. The mores are very much like a small town or a rural community, however close to Philly Conshy may be; and the community of buildings I could integrate my consciousness into, but not the people. The buildings had much to teach me; and the first lesson I learned is that the enchantment of buildings, and superior architecture, is a lynch-pin holding together all that is solid about human life. Sad that the ricochet to the populace didn't seem to work. And the Exile Ode is meant to swing between these two poles of awareness.