WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Poetry Fix: Architect's Watercolor

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Today, Erika Kyba reads Arthur Sze's "Architect's Watercolor." This is a poem that toes the line between potentiality and reality.

Welcome to the Poetry Fix on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7, FM. I'm your host, Erica Kaiba, bringing you your weekly fix of poetry from across time. Today we're reading Architects Watercolor by Arthur Zay. The central image of the poem is an architect creating a conceptual watercolor painting of a space that he is designing, and Zay uses this image to explore the tension between possibility and reality. The watercolor itself is all potentiality. People are about to enter a meeting room, about to have an encounter. There's also a figure in the watercolor who's staring out a window at an indeterminate object, either a park, a river, or skyscrapers beyond. The artist himself desires this potentiality, not wanting to be

locked like a carbon atom in a benzing ring. He then begins daydrabing of a variety of sensations, imagining flying across a shoreline, listening to a violin, or feeling sunlight against his eyelashes. He's able to hold all these possible sensations together in his mind as concepts. But eventually, the concept has to become reality. That's the point of the architect's conceptual artwork. It exists to show what could be in a space that will be. And so, as the poem ends, the architect steps outside and leaves real footprints against the sidewalk dusted with snow, instead of only traveling in his imagination. Because eventually, what could happen must crystallize into what does. With all that said, let's dive in.

Architect's Watercolor by Arthur Zay. An architect draws a watercolor depicting two people about to enter a meeting room, while someone on the stairway gazes through windows, at a park, river, skyscrapers beyond. He does not want to be locked like a carbon atom in a benzing ring, but needs to rotate, lift off, veer along wharves and shoreline. In the acoustics of this space, he catches a needle bounce off a black granite floor, wanders from a main walkway, encounters prickly pear burned purple in wind. In the ocean gusts before dawn, he urns for a Mediterranean spray, where sunlight tingles eyelashes,

where sand releases heat under the stars. In the atrium, two violinists launch fireworks of sound that arc, explode, dissolve into threads of melodic charm. Here, slate near a pool of water absorbs sunlight, releases ripples into the evening. And in this space, each minute, is encountered. He steps out and makes footprints on a sidewalk dusted with snow. You've been listening to The Poetry Fix with Erica Kaiba. If you enjoyed this episode, consider following The Poetry Fix on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. And if you have any poems you want to see in a future episode, email your suggestions to The Poetry Fix at gmail.com.

Join me next week and we'll be reading T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi. I'm