Gasometers at Clichy

It feels as though Signac set out to do

the house alone, only adding a single

daub a day, taking so long the future

timelapsed up around it. Look at a lack  

of grass erasing the foreground, then becoming

that blank, shouldering wall by which the building

begins to forget itself, its other living

reds. The lines of something leaving, passing

through us like a ghost, exit the front of the

frame in curves. Some light is being luminous,

on the chimneys as much as the sky, the blunt sky

a bright blank allowing the house to pinch 

the centre. The gasometers gather like gods or stacks 

of coins to watch the work-pants never drying.