In a child's vision marriage is a house. Fine lines bisect each plane, clean bleak, like the edge of a farmhouse: flat land, flashes of power lines, old trucks lopsided in gravel, corn, soy, soy, corn. I remind him of the time when we kicked a bottle cap for miles, rattling it against warehouse doors: we dated that as circa falling in love. At fifteen I wrote a letter to my then boyfriend from the Henry Ford Museum, and memorized the name: Bugatti, solid gold parts in the engine, which if one drove the car too fast would melt; and mailed the letter from a construction site. The stationary was child blue, wide sky blue. In the square states of the West they have so much room that they name baby girls Sky. The postal service decommissioned the collection box and he received the letter three years after I was married. In the architect's model small bent paper clips represent the humans caught in mid-wind, briefcases as shields, struggling into the shining building. Eaves drip rain. Downtown a steady cadence of sidewalks terse with the squeak of breaks and engines. The weather is bad, but it's mentioned nonchalantly. I wish it were different. Sometimes when waking, I don't recognize the room I'm in. One day I will call you at work. I will think of something funny to say like the man on the airplane who complained of the monotonous view.

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While writing this poem I was reading Annie Proulx, remembering my travels to windy places, and wondering how to build something simultaneously funny and sad.