A concrete mask on a theatre façade becomes a question about expression and loss. Hans Ostrom’s “Decoration” opens with an architectural ornament that “pretended to moan. Or sing? We weren't sure which.” From the first lines, sound and feeling are uncertain: the mask is given a voice, but nobody can quite name the emotion. The poem’s “we” stands before the Gold Coast Theatre building, playfully projecting moods onto stone. They deduce that the mask “despised a violin and bells / hanging below it, an architect’s tacky gifts,” turning the mask into a critic of its own ornament. That wit quickly deepens into a meditation on why humans decorate at all.
The central idea arrives in a plain list of materials: “There was concrete. There were bricks, glass, wood. / To these we donated our need of symbol, / our weakness for decoration.” Inert matter receives human meaning. The poem treats decoration not as mere embellishment but as an almost vulnerable need—a way of making the world answer back. The building, with its mask and bells, becomes a screen for the group’s desire to feel represented. “Our bodies / represented us in front of the old Gold Coast,” the speaker says, and that line cuts two ways: people can be symbols, too, standing like living ornaments before a theatre. The building “had left behind its design in order / to become,” as if a structure stops being a blueprint and starts being an experience, a memory, a presence shaped by those who look at it.
Then the poem shifts from presence to dispersal. “We are there no more, have scattered / to a heresy of heres.” The phrase “heresy of heres” is arresting: even the group’s shared departure from a common path has splintered into private, differing viewpoints. What once gathered in front of the Gold Coast has broken apart, leaving no single story. The theatre’s mask remains an image, but now it migrates inward. “Our memories are / synaptic masks that pretend to moan— / or sing? We’re not sure which.” The brain itself becomes an ornamented surface, performing feeling rather than simply recording it. Memory inherits the earlier uncertainty: still ambiguous, still theatrical, still unsure whether it mourns or celebrates.
That final ambiguity is the poem’s real subject. It suggests that memory does not preserve the past so much as decorate absence. “Our memories / design an architecture of absence” forms the closing couplet. Where the theatre had concrete, bricks, glass, and wood, memory has no solid material. Yet memory builds anyway—it gives shape to what is missing, arranging loss into patterns, façades, and masks. The word “design” links back to the architect’s plan and to the “tacky gifts” of the violin and bells. Human beings cannot stop designing, even when the thing being designed is emptiness.
The poem’s form mirrors this movement. It uses free verse with long, meditative lines and no regular rhyme, allowing the thought to turn from exterior to interior without a fixed grid. Subtle repetitions carry the weight: “concrete” returns from mask to building, “mask” returns from stone to synapse, “design” returns from building to memory. The repeated phrasing—“pretended to moan. Or sing? We weren't sure which” / “pretend to moan— / or sing? We’re not sure which”—creates a ghostly echo across time. What is uncertain in the past remains uncertain in the present. “Decoration” is significant because it treats architecture and memory as versions of the same act: turning silent matter, or silent loss, into something that seems to speak.