Cape Cod Baby Godzilla

What, exactly, is a Cape Cod house? I love this question. It has nothing, and everything, to do with anguish. The anguish of the moment, which is byzantine, and drunk with architecture. 

The Cape Cod house has a rectangular shape, steep roof, central chimney, and symmetrical design. Perfect for white night meditations, inexplicable ruptures within one’s personal realm, and a searching and extrasensory grammar.

The world is so incredible. Certain indecisions have to be expanded by colloquy, or collusion. Either one. Makes no difference. If our words have an impact on the surrounding totems, we stand back and watch as the animals squirm and gnash and fulminate into life. No one can hear us through the sound of the surf. We find our way by touch and intuition, as our ancestors did, in the forests of Saskatchewan and West Siberia. 

Sometimes there are signs. Signs can be important. Neon, digital, or LED. They can be hard to decipher, but full of convulsive beauty, syntactically ungovernable, but full of ingenious angles. They generally indicate the presence of Gaelic, or Lampong, or a nearby popcorn popper. Letters dance amid the new growths in the garden, legibly illegible, and daubed with sunlight. If, during our banter, my macaque gropes around for an offering of affection while I’m struggling to make myself coherent, pay it no mind. He won’t bite. It’s all just a poem anyway. This life. This cauldron. This wisteria of syllables. This aviary of vowels. This purposefully prurient purposelessness. Once you accept the premise that in a universe without any conclusive moral underpinning or reassuring consistency, anything can, and will, happen quite often, even if it means closing the garage early and going home. There comes a time when you just have to sit down somewhere quiet and ponder things. And we call this form of reflection salutary, because it leads to boisterous discussion, and Spinoza and quetzals and soothing moisturization.

I asked AI: is there any mention of Cape Cod architecture in the poetry of Wallace Stevens? And the answer was no. Apparently not. Although it did go on to say that Stevens' use of imagery and symbolism can evoke a sense of place and feeling that might resonate with the landscape of Cape Cod.

The highest concentration of Cape Cod architecture is in Massachusetts. This is the result of oysters, and Charles Olson, who I read as a youth in a backyard in downtown San José. Later in life, when I had come to appreciate how cacophonous my emotional life had turned out to be, despite my many attempts at kung fu and taekwondo, I could say, with the utmost proprioception, that if I should ever come to inhabit a Cape Cod house, I will certify my pretentions with soft cloth napkins and quietly murmured phonemes, and assume the proportions of a giant mailman. I will bring letters to people’s houses. And oysters and roosters and bombast. Beautiful beautiful bombast. Cradled in my arms like a Cape Cod baby Godzilla.