Vineclad

Cycling alongside the Schuylkill River in West Philadelphia we happened upon this superannuated industrial building in what seemed otherwise a residential street. I'd assumed it would be easy to find out something about its past history but on this occasion the internet was as unforthcoming as these sightless windows were inscrutable behind their tattered arras of creepers.

Or vines? My title conforms to the linguistic custom of this country in calling creepers vines. Back home that word is almost always confined to the plants that bear grapes. Strange.

Also strangely, I was only just earlier reading a piece about T.S. Eliot in the latest New Yorker. Who else could so precisely evoke the confluence of past and present?

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.