The cast is ever changing, be it at Old Eli its ownself
Or various other institutions, most sans ivy,
Their distinguished here-and-gones
A touch short of presidents and laureates,
And certainly the songbook has changed
(Out with the Crosby and Waring,
In with the Cobain and the Stryper)
But certain verities, gnawing and implacable,
Remain unchanged, the inevitable realization
That, for all one's promise, all of our ilk
Have preceded us in our arrival, flush with pride and promise,
And made the odd ripple or two, perhaps,
Before shambling onward to other things
(Very rarely bigger and better, sadly enough)
And all those songs we sang and steins we hoisted
Have now been consigned to less fashionable quarters
In the anterooms of memory,
The melodies and laughter filtered, transformed, muted
The sound not unlike the slightly discomfiting bleatings
Of some distant barnyard animal.

i.

I smile, sometimes, thinking of how I liked the old Byrds tunes
Back in my seminary days, for I have come to know
(Mostly by these cucumbers, hostas, and ****** dandelions)
That there is very much a season for all things,
For our run in this plane is strictly proscribed,
And having the end date somewhat fixed
A blessing from God, in fact,
For it makes one focus on those things
That are truly meaningful,
To appreciate when there is need to make fine gradations
(For if you plant the peas and parsley just a couple of days,
Indeed mere hours too early, an unexpectedly still and cold night
May steal all of your labors, leaving you with tiny, lifeless shoots
Slumped over the lip of a clay ***)
And when not to waste sound and fury, as it were,
Over the most trifling of things;
For, when the final ascertainment is made, it will not be as an audit,
(Saint Peter himself staring over his glasses
As he punches the calculator,
Clucking as he reviews the number of bottoms in the pews,
The weight of the collection plate,
The state of the cement or flagstone
Leading to the stairs of the cathedral),
But an over-long movie, the seemingly most insignificant of scenes
Screened several times (if it please God) for your viewing pleasure.

ii.

For I have sinned, yes, most exceedingly,
Dear Saints and My Lord,
In lack of thought and foresight, in the expedient holding
Of my tongue, in the unthinking failure to act.
Mea culpa
Mea culpa
Mea maxima culpa.
Blessed ******, I cannot,
In the self-serving pride of my guilt,
Ask you to pray for my soul,
But I would pray that, perhaps,
I will have had the briefest of moments
Where I was not totally unworthy.

iii.

I was, at one time, a different lifetime to me now
Part of the Bishop’s diocesan staff in Boston,
Great city of pristine churches
Surrounded by blooms of all the colors He could bring
And shanty Irish rough as the day the boat landed
(One size Fitz all, the joke was back in those days)  
I was more functionary than rising star in the hierarchy,
Nicknamed “The Bishop’s Travel Agent”,
My function was to find a place for those priests
Who had become , in the vernacular, “troublesome”,
Sending priests whose comforting
Of the younger females among his flock
Strayed over the line of purely spiritual
To some remote Aroostook village
Or, if such problems ran more to altar boys,
Some convent in the Berkshires.
We were, so I told myself, being judicious,
And all in the best interests of the Church.
One time we were wrong, horribly wrong;
There was a suicide, whispers,
Letters which should have been burned.
Many of my colleagues complained, bitterly,
That I had been made
An unworthy scapegoat for the Bishop,
But I knew in my soul such an assertion
Was merely halfway correct.

iv.

Yet perhaps I will—no, indeed, I must—be saved,
For our Lord is good, and Christ shall have mercy,
And exchange this long walk through foolishness and vanity
With life everlasting, even for those of us
Who have stumbled along clumsily,
Unthinkingly, unheedingly upon Your creation.
Kyrie, eleison;
Christe, eleison;
Kyrie, eleison.

v.


It is good, then; the days have been dry
And unusually warm, the nights cool
Yet without the danger of frost.
The beans and tomatoes should thrive,
And the sunflowers should grow
Well… like sunflowers, one would surmise.
As for myself, the good days
Are examples of His grace,
The bad ones no more than I can bear,
And the doctors (mere men, after all)
Minister to me as well as men can.
I have, blessedly, no trepidation
As relates to the close of my small one-act play
On this patch of earth.  
Indeed, I am often cheered
That I have seen small green shoots
Rising from the years of fallen leaves
Which I have raked up and dumped upon the brush lot
Between the church itself
And the old graveyard at the rear of the property.

Now how to figger what makes a feller tick?
They’re hot and they’re cold and they’re nothin’ at all.
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

A body can stand herself pretty and slick
But he’ll hem and he’ll haw and harrumph an’ stall
Now how to figger what makes a feller tick?

I’d much rather take on a lion that’s sick
Than a certain mouse backed up ‘gin a wall.
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

Wish I had a gris-gris or some other trick
So’s I could hold a certain feller in thrall;
Now how to figger what makes a feller’ tick?

Sof’ words and June moons—why, they ain’t worth a lick
If your life is just one big free-for-all
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

Your poor hawt cries a river an’ beats real quick
When love takes you down like a cannonball.
Now how to figger what makes a feller’ tick?
(Th’ persuasive arts ain’t no match for a brick.)

She slumped by the archway of the Chapel,
Forlorn, beaten in fact;
She had come to these grounds from Plattsburgh,
(Cold, martial little city home to General Wood’s summer flings)
To lay a wreath she’d bought near the train station at Bayeux
Purchased from a women at a small shop table,
Who’d had the grace not to haggle over-much,
Knowing full well why someone would make such a purchase.
She’d hoped to lay it at her brother’s marker;
He’d been lost at Omaha, likely before he’d set foot on the sand
(She’d no ideas of such things at the time,
Death being a thing that happened to rabbits
Their old shepherd chased down in the back yard,
Or dolls beheaded courtesy of her younger brother)
But the plot number given to her with such confidence
By the young adjutant from the War Department
Had a name wholly unknown to her
(Where the information was bollixed she had no way of knowing,
Not that officialdom would be any more help to her,
With so many sons in Scranton,
So many husbands in Hamtramck,
So many fathers and brothers in the same boat)
And so she sat, overwhelmed with the distance she’d come,
The magnitude of her failure and its implications,
And the whole **** burden of simple humanity
When she was approached by an older man,
Who clearly resided nearby
(Why he was here less evident—the hush of the venue, perhaps,
Possibly some corporal he was indebted to).
He’d understood her predicament in an instant,
No doubt a scene he’d witnessed scores of times before,
Laissez-le sur un monument funéraire,
He crooned, patting her forearm
Ce n’est pas important, and he sauntered away.
She’d considered heeding his advice,
But she remained hostage
To some vestige of latter-day Babbitesque can-do,
And so she soldiered back toward the endless rows of marble,
Stretching out in endless parallel lines
As in some middle-school perspective perspective drawing
Without borders, without end.

Perhaps it was her voice itself, clear and simple,
Unalloyed by any classically trained fol-de-rol,
Or possibly the nature of her faith
Displayed with such clarity, such transparency
By that very instrument,
But in any case, she had utterly bewitched the populace
Of the place known as Ahwaga by her distant cousins,
And when she stood on the Delaware & Hudson platform
The next morning, they had cheered her lustily,
All but begging her You must return to us,
But the train had lost its footing on a sharp grade
Mere hundreds of yards before making the station at Deposit,
And she was lost in the carnage and conflagration.
The townspeople she had said her farewells to that morning
Were distraught, their feelings a mix of grief
And an odd sense of culpability, a nagging misgiving
That perhaps this was an omen, some augury
Denoting that their own faith was not up to scratch,
And so they had taken her back to their own burgh
To bury her in a manner befitting her piety
(She had been travelling with siblings,
But they acquiesced to the plan, though how willingly
Not wholly apparent at the time,
And made no clearer through the ramble of time)
And so she was laid to rest in a plot
Surrounded by ornate fencing, her grave marked
By an obelisk pointing unambiguously to her Heaven,
And it is said that, on autumn evenings
When the breeze rustle the dying leaves just so,
You can hear the spirits of her Mohawk brethren
Come down from Quebec, murmuring songs
Telling of the spirits living in the trees and hedgerows,
Spoken in the ancient tongue
Of the languid, unhurried Susquehanna far below.

I mean no disrespect, understand;
Larry Tate is a hell of a guy,
But if you can’t wrangle up a showgirl or ****** on short notice,
You have no business calling yourself an ad man.
Likewise, the Stephens kid gets results
(God only knows how he carries off
Some of the last-minute miracles he pulls out of his ***)
But you gotta keep him away from the money clients;
Too skittish, too much of a loose cannon.  
No, every agency needs a core principle,
A philosophy to anchor itself on;
You remember the first big campaign we did?
You call that a suit?  Mine’s an Irving Freibush.
That was my baby, and let me tell you,
I didn’t need a focus group
Or some fifty-thousand dollar demographic study
To figure out if the ******* desk
The model was leaning against should be oak or cherry.  
I knew it would work,
Because I knew what every ad man
(And preacher and politician, for that matter)
Worth a **** knows as well as he knows his own name;
That everyone, deep inside, feels they are not quite right,
That they’re a little slow, a little shabby,
A little less than their fellow man.
We just (quietly, mind you) reinforce that notion a bit,
And present them a shinier, newer band-aid.
Anyway, the ads worked like gangbusters,
And it always gave me the jollies that both Hef and Billy Graham
Each had a closet full of those suits.  
Look, what we do isn’t rocket science or parlor tricks,
But a bunch of ******* figures
At the bottom line of the ledger book?
Now that, boys and girls, is ******* magic.

No one may contest that a contract existed
Between my client and the respondent;
This much is beyond debate,
Nor did the plaintiff in any way compel
This miller’s-daughter-***-queen in any manner,
Unless one contends that providing a vehicle
To obtain all that she had ever desired
Somehow equates to coercion.
As to my learned colleague’s claim
That the imposition of so-called usurious terms by my client
Serves to render the agreement null and void,
May I remind you that at no point in this affair
Did the respondent decline to accept the quid pro quo;
Indeed, she happily re-negotiated the terms of the very pact
She now seeks to vacate!

Ah, opposing counsel claims, my client fulfilled the agreement
In accordance with the law.
I must say, rather sadly,
I find my distinguished friend’s definition of fulfillment
Very odd, indeed, as if the employment of industrial espionage,
Illegal trespass, surveillance methods of dubious legitimacy
(All of which were undertaken
To surreptitiously provide his client with such information
To exercise the out-clause of the agreement)
Is something the court should embrace
As a matter of statute or accepted practice.

Again, members of the jury, I know where your sympathies lie.
All along , opposing counsel has implied
We should celebrate his client’s pluckiness,
Her cunning and initiative,
Her stunning journey from rages to riches.
My friends, I would argue this;
There is, indeed, a moral to every story,
Are our obligations and promises, at the end of the day,
No more than the interview portion of some beauty pageant,
Where long blonde hair and a winning smile
Serve as just cause to blithely disregard those oaths?
Are the most sacred of vows
Less binding upon those whom Nature and the mirror
Have favored more so than those among us
Who are among the unattractive and underloved?
Ladies and gentlemen, it is up to you
To write the final chapter of our fable.
I thank you for your service.