The Cathedral You Could Not Stop Building (Antoni Gaudí)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You dressed every morning
the way a man dresses
when his head
is too full of a roof
to remember
which suit
he put on,
and the people on the street
thought you were a beggar
because the suit
had not been a suit
for a long time
and the head inside the suit
was three hundred feet up
on a spire
that did not yet exist
in any city
that had a name.

[Verse 2]
You hung weights
from strings
in the basement
of your workshop
and let gravity
draw the curves
your spires were going to follow
upward
in the opposite direction,
and you held a small mirror
under the model
to see
what the building
was going to look like
right side up,
and you grinned
at the reflection
because the math
had done
your homework
for you.

[Chorus]
The streetcar found you
on a Tuesday
in nineteen twenty-six
and the first three hospitals
turned you away
because the most famous architect
in Barcelona
did not look the part,
and you said
*let me die here
among the poor,
they are my people,*
and the building
kept going
without you
and is still going
without you
and the spires
are still climbing
upward
the way the chains
in your basement
fell down.

[Verse 3]
You believed
the cathedral
would take three hundred years
because the men
who built Chartres
did not see Chartres either
and you were calm about that
and you knew
which order
you wanted
to belong to.

[Outro]
The basilica
is scheduled
to top out
this year,
and the spire
that goes up last
is the one
you drew
in the basement
with the strings
when you were thirty-six
and could not yet
imagine
that the strings
would still be holding
ninety years
after the streetcar
found you
on the cobblestones
on the way
to vespers.

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