Before crossing the Styx

What will become of the house
when my ticket arrives?
No one could love it but me,
this broken husk of a home
that nonetheless flared
with music, poetry,
children's wraiths in the night
with dreams in their eyes,
who went elsewhere to heal,
as did I - and sometimes
return in their thoughts,
but do not abide...

What will remain
when jackhammers have done:
a wistful shape
in somebody's mind?
After atoms and particles,
timber and iron,
there will surely remain
a shape in the mind,
dissolving in space and time,
not the same
in the archives housed
in each memoried child...

But I grieve for the trees
that suck air
and host birds
in lobed embrasures of chlorophyll:
that they should fall with the house,
rank and file -
the faithful guards,
the forsaken shrine...

What will become
of the children
I nurtured as miracles -
undeserving, inspired - 
the woman and young man
grown whole from my veins?
If I could carry
in my soul
as a talisman
their remembered gaze,
would it burden the shades,
would Charon complain?

Though it is cold on the water,
you feel nothing there;
in the Stygian dark
you are blind.
It is before the parting,
they say,
you suffer torment,
earthly pain...