Neel Reid: The Absent Influence

Lyrics

You can feel a ghost in these trees.
A certain angle to the roofline.
A specific quiet on Habersham Road.
Neel Reid.
You were gone by nineteen twenty-six.
Just forty-one.
Your career, a flash of lightning, then the long, slow roll of thunder that followed.
You taught this red clay how to dream in limestone and classical columns.
Your Andrew Calhoun House still holds its breath down the road, a perfect, finished sentence.
And the rest of them… they heard you.
Even when you weren't there.
The absent influence.
The quiet standard, the unspoken rule written on the humid Atlanta air.
A ghost at the drafting table, a whisper of pencil lead on vellum, looking over their shoulders.
Three years before you left, nineteen twenty-three.
Francis Palmer Smith and his man Pringle, they broke ground on Cherokee Road.
A good house. Number twenty-one.
Solid. American Colonial Revival, they called it.
But they were speaking your language. They had to be.
We all did.
The whole of Buckhead learned your dialect of grandeur.
Was it a race?
An argument in brick and slate?
Or just the sound of the era, the ringing hammers of the nineteen-twenties boom, and your voice was simply the clearest?
The scent of cut pine and new money.
Fifteen years of work, and your shadow is a century long.
Smith and Pringle, they built three hundred houses.
Good bones, all of them.
But I drive down Cherokee, past their fine, symmetrical work...
...and I still see your lines.
I still hear your whisper in the proportion of the columns.
The ghost in the blueprint.
Still here.