The Greenhouse Effect
Feb 9 2014


In architectural magazines
the homes are floor to ceiling glass,
dream palaces

that look incandescent,

impregnable as stone.

Filled with light, pneumatic air
their roofs are effortless,
as if gravity
exempted the rich.
Transparent walls
seem immaterial,
hermetic, unblemished
buffed.
And their privileged denizens
more perfect versions
of us.

They seem to proclaim
we have nothing to hide
or fear.
Our glass
is unbreakable.
Sun will not fade
expensive art.
Our well-behaved kids
leave no fingerprints,
play out-of-sight.

The greenhouse effect
does not apply
despite the glass,
because giant compressors
keep us cool.
The planet may warm
but we are not fools;
tempered, tinted, triple-glazed
nothing has changed
for us.

The real estate section of the paper got me thinking -- once again -- that there isn't much to high-end modernist architecture these days: nothing more than glass walls and high ceilings and clean lines. I confess I like the look; but I'm not sure those celebrated and highly paid architects have earned their accolades. (Or maybe earned them as engineers, but not as artists.) I was also thinking about the staged perfection of these trophy homes: houses that are hermetically untouched by human hands, or real life. And I was also thinking about the technology of glass: how something that seems so immaterial can be so strong; about the alchemy of turning sand into something so smoothly transparent.

Anyway, all that glass had me thinking I could do something with that old cliché about living in glass houses: about exposure and privacy; about the unintended consequences of living in a greenhouse. And once "greenhouse" entered into it, it was pretty inevitable the poem would end up becoming political. Which is just where it went: about climate-change deniers; and especially about the complacent self-satisfied rich who think their money, which exempts them from so much, also exempts them from the laws of physics. (Maybe I had my brother and sister-in-law mind, who are right now in Turks and Caicos, socializing with their Republican friends -- all climate-change deniers! -- at their various mansions, gazing out in air-conditioned comfort through floor-to-ceiling glass!)

When I chose the title "Greenhouse Effect", I think the idea of "hothouse" effect was also germinating in the back of my mind: the sort of hothouse that comes from the hot air of spouting nonsense; and the sort of hothouse effect of surrounding yourself with like-minded people (either that, or ideological echo chamber), so you hear only opinions that confirm what you already believe. ...Which, unfortunately, can be as true of those on the political left (like me!) as it is of those benighted right-wingers I had in mind!

I generally dislike political poems. The essay is a much better form for argument, the presentation of fact. But I think this piece works as well as poetry as it does as agit-prop. Or at least it saves its self-indulgence and polemics for the final stanza. Which may strike some readers as unfair, conscripting them into investing in a poem that doesn't give the emotional pay-off they were expecting. Then again, it may leave other readers nodding their heads, saying to themselves "it's about time he said something worth saying!"