Visiting the Dead in Paris
Underground, water drips through cracks, steady as a tribal drum.
The bored young guide shuffles us single file
down the narrow, uneven stairway into a dim cavern
of bones, prayers and poems carved into torchlit stone.
We shiver together, here in the damp cold.
Catacombs stretch for miles beneath city streets
bustling with life― with bicycles and bread
and beautiful women in colorful skirts,
mothers calling their wayward daughters home to supper.
Here, the eyeless dead, arranged in layers, tell me the truth―
tell me that even my afterlife will require
as much planning, as much care and careful worry
as a month-long trek across Europe.
My lover’s hand flutters close by, a lovesick moth
seeking the summery flame of me
amidst the cloud-heavy press of shadows
while tourist cameras flash like heat lightning.
One day, I think, some surviving relative
will open a dust-covered album, thumb through photographs
of this underworld, enigmatic and starved
for touch as an ancient Greek puzzle box.
Perhaps they will catch a glimpse of me there, just ahead―
swaddled in the blue raincoat I shed like old skin
weeks later in a guesthouse in Prague―as I vanish into the swallowing dark
like the wintry ghost of Persephone in her wedding gown,
the stacked and silent dead bearing witness as I go.
