The poem is a ladder going down, and the rungs are constructed with more care than they first appear. King, billionaire, millionaire, a few thousand, a penny — the wealth halves and halves again. What tracks alongside it is a sequence of building verbs, and they descend on exactly the same schedule. Build a nation. Raise a palace. Frame a mansion. Break ground on an addition. Building, raising, framing, breaking ground — each verb describes an earlier and smaller stage of construction than the one before it. By the fourth rung the speaker is not finishing a house, he is starting a room, and by the fifth he has nothing to build with at all.

The penny stanza is where the poem turns from arithmetic into argument. “If I had a penny / I’d toss it in the fountain / and spend the wish on you.” The smallest unit of currency buys the only thing on the list he cannot construct, and spend the wish is the phrase that earns the poem — the coin is not the gift, the wish is, and wishes turn out to be the currency he actually deals in.

“Instead, broke” is the poem’s only flat statement and it arrives without cushioning. What follows is the one image in the piece that is neither wealth nor wish: a man rubbing the belly of a laughing Buddha. It is a folk gesture, free, requiring nothing, and the statue is laughing while he does it. The poem does not say whether the laughter is companionable or at his expense.

Then the ladder drops below money. “If I had a plot for two—” is the poem’s real move, and it works because a burial plot is real estate. The list has been running through property the whole time — nation, palace, mansion, addition — and this is the last parcel on it, the cheapest and the most permanent. What he can offer at the bottom of the descent is the only accommodation that lasts: “you would be with me / for eternity.” Every previous gift was something she would live in. This one is something they occupy together.

The frame closes precisely. “If I only…” opens the poem unfinished, an ellipsis with nothing after it, and returns at the end completed: “If I only… / had you here.” Two words, and they retroactively explain the whole inventory. The nation, the palace, the mansion, the penny — none of them were ever the point. Presence was, and it is the one item on the list that money was never going to reach.

Better built than a first reading suggests. The descending wealth is the obvious structure; the descending construction verbs running underneath it are the craft, and most readers will feel that progression without identifying it. Build, raise, frame, break ground — four stages of a house being started in reverse order.

The burial plot is the reason the poem succeeds. Continuing a real-estate inventory past the point where money runs out, and landing on the one parcel that costs least and lasts longest, gives the piece an ending its opening did not promise. “Side by side / for eternity” would be sentimental almost anywhere else; here it has been paid for by five stanzas of failed purchases.

The laughing Buddha is the poem’s most human moment — a free ritual performed by a man with nothing, and a statue that finds it funny.

The reservation is the opening trio. King, billionaire, millionaire is the least inventive sequence available for this move, and the three lines are built to identical length and rhythm, so the poem takes a stanza to develop any texture. One substitution — something specific rather than a rank — would sharpen the whole descent.