December in the Lobby of NBBJ

Glass all around and outside something like a courtyard, but smaller, slimmer, moving. A skinny market. A pedestrian cross street. A parked truck, laden with ladders, blinks there. Clean surfaces. Undriven roads. Switzerland!! Rusted metal. Steel girders. Weathered brick. Bamboo hedge. Sculpted space, cool space. And moving through the space, men and women. Freshly cut hair. The right sweater. I do not have the jacket, shoes, look for this. My glasses are outdated. In every way, I am patched together. Inside the lobby, on the floor, I find a ball from my sweater, a fuzz ball. Only it is out of place. Charcoal gray ottomans with a hint of camel in shadow flank 3 long leather benches in true camel. Bent strips of metal serve as side tables and hold glass cylinders with red floral mixes of winter and spring. Ordinary people, I suppose, in thoughtful places, smart places, clean bright spaces. Spaces with room--to move, think, earn, gain.

The receptionist says there are 300 employees. A corporation indeed! Don't let it overwhelm you, frumpy little poet. No mess. No trash. Just one little fuzz ball out of place. And you, sitting on the sable stable, looking at the specked rubber floor that stretches as far as the night sky from under you. And white tile in a moat around that. But look! There are lines to pull you up. An opaque purple column of glass! Does it bear weight? 8 silver dollars of light in an angle on the floor. 9 wood beams, 8 bands of glass, form a massive stair that lifts in a pressured ceiling above the receptionist, doomed. But her cords are taken care of. Where is her mess of attachments? How do her devices work?

An oversized, brown bristle mat, set into the floor, walks 15' through the door. In the preamble, then, are the shadows of 5 tools, compacted, elongated and widened behind their tool of shadow. 5 hand tools evenly spaced on an acrylic board. We work. We work. We work. Etc. The ceiling, though, is unfinished, as if to say this is what we were, what we could have been, our under stuffs. Pipes painted taupe. Taupe.

All who move here are darkly dressed, not in black, but in non-black darks. Code for winter success. The floor is noisy with clicking tapping, clacking shoes. No rubber soles. Only good shoes. Leather crafts. Waiting is anxious making. It heightens things. I wait.