Greg Williamson is a master in this genre. I think I might have seen "Origami," from Errors in the Script, posted here before. Here is another tour de force from Greg's first book, The Silent Partner.
Chant Royal
One of modern architecture’s greatest failings has been its
lack of interest in the relationship of the building to the sky.
One doubts that a poem was ever written to a flat-roofed building
silhouetted against the setting sun. Paul Randolph
Imagine the architect’s early discontent
With wooden blocks or musty counterpane
Draping across the table like a tent,
Already found too flimsy and mundane
For a girl who dreamed of spires and tower clocks,
Looking across the domed and pitched terrain
Of roofs. And now to stand in a great glass building
And stare down on the glistening gridlocks
And contemplate the job she’s just begun:
To diagram another flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.
Late nights deciphering each document,
Learning the books, the styles, the fine arcane
Refinements of the guild; what keen torment
To look across the panoramic chain
Of burger shops, the whitebread Bun-in-a-Box,
Closed circuit malls and movieplex, domain
Of the hopelessly bored, who cruise a tinsel building
As in some sleek flourescent Skinner box
Of Muzak, mirrors, and shiny three-for-one
Diamelle displays in a flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.
She’d seen a couple in one of those cement
And I-beam towers, wrapped in cellophane
To look like televisions, where the vent
Exhales a sibilant, chalky Novocain
To feed the plastic ferns and gleaming locks
Of lacquered hair. She had seen their smiles drain
Like Pepsi, as they mounted a desk, building
A rhythm: her legs in the air, he stood in his socks.
They banged and sobbed and screamed for all or none,
Fucking for dear life in a flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.
The gimcrack sprawls across the continent:
Doomed kitchenettes in simulated grain,
The paste and paper condos made to rent,
In which each standard untrimmed windowpane
Is rattling and all the plumbing knocks—
Threatening to melt with the first good rain,
Like giant tracts of sugar cubes they’re building.
But down below, somehow, on streets and docks
The Fades and Crew Cuts get the workdays done,
Like some austere and silent flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.
She imagines that anonymous Resident
Picking up his mail, the brood of inane
Blow-ins that flutter from a supplement,
A hardware owner putting on the chain
At a block and panel storage room, and flocks
Of dusky birds at windbreaks on the plain
Where cattle nose away and storms are building.
She thinks of nightshift boys who check the stocks
And of putting up her feet on an empty tun
On the terrace of her sublet flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.
Out at the county line, the sun is gilding
The causeway, where a shed of cinderblocks
Houses the antiquated pumps that run,
And go on running, in a flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.
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