This would be a memory now, if not yet
Forgotten. There was a hole in the wall,
A literal window punched out of windowless
Cinderblock unalleviated by anything
Else but a coat of interior white paint.
Under said window, which was a luxury,
Somebody spent his working days for years.
It was not a prison, as often as he thought
It functioned as a helpful cell for that
And other thoughts. In his last days
Working there, his view increasingly
Was blocked by the multistory structure
Rising across the parking lot, cement pour
By cement pour, two-by-four by two-by-four
With red and yellow cranes on top,
And he fondly imagined Bruegel's Tower,
Not the great or little oils on wood,
Although those were the only images
His mind had, but the lost miniature
Painted on ivory, the idea of which charmed
Him with its almost angels-on-the-head
Of-a-pin absurdity. Who paints the Tower
To Heaven, the one that alarmed the Divine
Enough to confuse our human languages,
Turn us into crazy ants, slow us down
Before we reached into the vaults of power,
As a miniature in Rome? He would smile,
Watching the ordinary, slapdash building
Likely either to fall into proverbial desuetude
And be torn down within decades
For something else in its place or to topple
Over in one of the earthquakes also ordinary,
However easily forgotten, in that lava-strewn
Town, and imagine it rising into deep night,
Tickling the chins of sleeping God, crane
After crane, every worker humming along
In the same tongue, escaping the world.
Then he would turn out the lights
In the office and watch the cars leave the lot,
As the actual building went quiet until dawn.
Time to close the blinds, he thought.
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