One thought this is how London looked after The Blitz
Although there was no one's finest hour to be cited
Commemorating how these torched shells of buildings came to be,
Standing not in defiance as much as the indifference of gravity
To finishing a job better not left incomplete,
Given they were fit for nothing but rats and pigeons
(And they probably not without their misgivings)
But one night we were driving over to Jersey
To obtain grain alcohol or some other contraband,
I'd observed the odd single-bulb shining out of
What purported to be a windowless frame,
Misbegotten wished-upon stars
Failing to deliver upon the most prosaic of aspirations,
And that evening I'd drank with a taciturn fury,
My companions shaking their heads,
Saying For chrissakes, you're less ******* fun than usual.
Go the hell home, or haunt a ******' graveyard,
And I did not travel upon that highway again
Until I left The Island for good, grabbing a ride
From a friend who was a fellow native
Of the cold, cow country Upstate
And as we approached the Throgs Neck Bridge,
I turned away from the window, telling my buddy
I'm gonna grab some shut-eye; you can wake me
Once we hit the Palisades.

What God has put asunder, I have joined together.
He chuckles at this somewhat self-consciously,
His clientele comprised primarily of gentlemen of a certain age,
Most of whom have stepped off to the altar
Twice or thrice, some even more,
Whose wives will be, at least pro tem,
The mistresses of the Moorish bastardizations
Being commissioned by their husbands,
Vaguely Iberian grotesqueries
Christened Sin Cuidado and Villa Tranquilla
Festooned with cornucopias of cornices and cupolas,
Featuring vaulted cathedral ceilings and open-prairie floor plans,
Impossible to cool in the ninety-degree dawn of August
Or heat during the all too frequent cold snaps,
(Such being noted to him by a visitor
From a staid Boston architectural firm,
To which he replied, Save that for the classrooms, pal.
I give the people what they want, dad,
And these folks are first, last, and forever
All about the façade.)

It is not, however, his effort to turn Florida’s East Coast
Into a giant movie set for the stories of Don Juan or El Cid
Which inspires him to utter his inversion of the marital vow.
He has moved beyond being a mere designer;
He is a man of substance, a builder in the larger, cosmic sense,
And so he is here, in this sticky, sweltering venue
Which disappointed Spaniards named after a rat’s oral cavity,
To make a new Venice, complete with electric gondolas,
Cloisters which would put any in the Old World to shame,
Gesturing, bellowing, and cajoling,
A Prospero of sawhorses and steam shovels,
As displaced Seminoles and colored laborers
Sweat and swear and stumble
As they dredge swamps and hack down stumpy mangroves
In the service of his vision, the aggrandizement of his bottom line,
Arm-twisting the caprices of drought and hurricane
To serve the pricier whims
Of a gaggle of DuPonts and Wanamakers.
It’s not that I don’t believe in a higher power, he will demur,
I’m simply not averse to some slight enhancement of His plans.

It is rather unremarkable,
Or at least as so as such a pane may be,
Depicting a trinity not mentioned in Scripture,
Though their handiwork would likely merit approval
From any member of the trio cited therein,
As they went forth humbly,
In humble carriages in service
Of an ostensibly prosaic task
But certainly on the side of the angels,
As must have been noted
In each of their respective services
(Closed-casket affairs, one presumes
Given the state of the remains
After they were extracted
From the earthen dam site where they were discarded)
And their particular Caiaphas
Dispensed with sending their cases onward
For further consideration
(He too a man of the cloth, but also a mill operator,
Producing two-by-fours worthy of use on Calvary)
And after he had passed sentence,
Leaving matters to take course,
One assumes he went home, washed up
And made his usual rote recitations
Asking for Him to watch over his and his ownself.

It makes sense that it should end in this way;
No fingers to point, appeals to hear.
(The critics have spoken, we’ll close the play.)

Tell the dour old priest to go away,
I’ve no time left for repentance and fear;
It makes sense that it should end in this way.

There’s no final role I need to portray
As my whos and whys are perfectly clear.
(The critics have spoken, we’ll close the play.)

No fretting about a life gone astray;
I plotted the course which I chose to steer.
It makes sense that it should end in this way.

Let others live to fight another day;
I’m at peace with all that which brought me here.
It makes sense that it should end in this way.
(The critics have spoken, we’ll close the play.)

You move beyond the luxury of panic,
Beyond the realm of heroic measure,
To such a point where clarity is superseded,
Itself a linear matter and beneath further concerns,
Beyond cursing yourself for failing to heed
Such self-imposed caution as had taken you this far,
And a life does not flash before ones eyes
As much as thoughts and images
Hopscotch into consciousness
Without a particular plan or pattern:
The party you left early, being under strict orders
To be home at such-and-such a time,
Only to be greeted by your mother
Who seemed genuinely surprised
You would take such strictures to heart,
Sundry boxes carried out of sundry workplaces
Under an equally broad array of circumstances,
Times you'd laid back upon the ground,
Looking at the clouds as or like a child
With no rationale save that it seemed like a fine thing,
Any number of snippets trodding on each side of the line
Separating memory and hallucination,
Wondering at last how a body mostly composed of water
Comes to such a pass,
And then there is nothing but.

When that day of reckoning comes
(Hopefully, some light years distant,
As I like anyone else, cling stubbornly if not desperately
To this process of plodding aimlessly along)
Where the book of myself is closed, I have asked,
Though how I plan to enforce the wish remains an open question,
That I am not Cadillac-carted to some incongruous green space
Where some dark-clad and stiff-collared stranger
Bounces pebble-laden soil onto the top of my bedding for the ages.
Much better,  at least to my way of thinking,
That the remnants of my essentials
Are strewn upon some cold Adirondack lake,
Or perhaps if its current residents
Are sympathetic and not particularly litigious,
The backyard of my childhood home
(I have not fleshed out that particular portion of the equation,
As I, like most people, am much less emphatic about my do’s
Than I am concerning my don’ts and won’ts.)

On the odd occasion, I am visited by a curious dream
Concerning my departure from this particular plane;
There is a fire, though not some vast, heroic Viking pyre,
(Even my reveries have a certain reserve about them)
But something less prepossessing,
Like some small pile of leaves,
Such as my father burned when I was a young boy,
And a black-suited cleric stands before the flames,
His face only somewhat familiar, yet still comforting
(A distant uncle or favorite teacher, perhaps)
And he litters the embers with the residue of my corporeal self
With words absolving the folly of my acts of commission
(The stumbling footfalls of the blind; throw them on the fire)
The shortsightedness of my omissions,
(Boorishness of children and fools; throw them on the fire)
The sum of my shortcomings and misadventures
(Victims of our angels and gods; throw them on the fire)
And the trails of smoke drift aimlessly upward,
Toward birds who cackle and twitter unconsciously,
Oblivious to all the machinations below.

He had, when it became clear
The dog was on his last legs,
Went to a canine memorial concern,
One of those somewhat well-intentioned marketing brainstorms
Which operated under the assumption
That what was good enough for master was good enough for Fido,
And the folks who ran the place dressed in dark suits
Which accentuated the notion that what they did
Was no different than going through the paces
Of sending Grandma to her final reward
(Though the whole thing carried out
With a wink and a nod,
All of which by no means bringing credit to man nor dog.)
He'd been put off by the whole fol-de-rol,
Though he'd sat dutifully through the videos and brochures,
Being possessed of the same damnable politeness
Which made a place like this possible if not necessary,
And he'd ignored the two or three follow-up inquiries.
The dog finally came to his rest
On one of those gray silent November days
Which were the harbinger of the locking season,
And he'd taken him down to the back part of his property
Where he'd had the soybeans in this year,
A spot where three or four of his dogs already resided,
And though there was no markers or such on the spot,
He reckoned that the fact it was a good patch of growing land
Was sufficient testament to their standing.