The Cullet on Bruce Goff’s Monument
J. Quinn Brisben 6 JUL 2004
How like him, how very like him
To use his grave marker to teach me
A new word: “cullet”: a lump of fused glass
Added to new material to facilitate
Melting, a catalyst aiding a process
As teachers naturally do, as he did,
And now his friends have placed his ashes
Under the marker with his angled
Geometric script on the lagoon shore
Of Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery looking
To the little island with Burnham
Underneath his boulder, near Mies, near
Gravity-defying Ruth Page, across
From the graceful levels Shaw designed
For the Goodmans, down the path
From the twining elegance of Sullivan’s
Getty Tomb, among his peers, with that
Startling gem-like glass cullet from
The destroyed but phoenix-like Price house
Back home in Bartlesville, Oklahoma,
That still exists in loving pictures.
At least it was built, for he had
More ideas than patrons, but treated
Patrons well, having learned a
Modesty that his master did not teach.
Neither did he make students worship him,
Merely freed their minds to be themselves
With his spaces as their examples:
Grain elevators that had learned from beehives,
An infinity cantilevered from a rooted pole,
A spiral echoing with Japanese treasures,
A place for worship from Quonset huts,
And his own space concealed beneath a stadium
Where ideas split and fused like atomic nuclei.
I never took his courses. I had no math
Or drawing skills, but I was welcome
Under the stadium seats on weekend nights,
Encountering for the first time the swirling
Drips of Jackson Pollock, the talking wound
Of Cocteau’s poet, the low passageways
Of the palace of Eisenstein’s Ivan,
For his spaces were meant to be open
To anyone with an opening mind.
I was not there to help him when
The cops entrapped him with a punk
And forced him from the school. Dante
Encountered his old master Brunetto,
Who had taught him allegorical journeys,
Among Sodomites in the seventh infernal circle,
Praised him highly but could not cool the fire.
Goff should have had a chance to be a cullet
Helping many more to blaze and fuse
And cool into transparent clarity,
But he kept on, and the buildings are there,
And the drawings are there to learn from,
And those he taught are teaching others.
The sun strikes the cullet into brilliant light.
