Cemetery Honeymoon
Pere LaChaise, Paris, 11.96
Taking the underground route
to the city of the dead,
passing by billboard ads,
we watch map sellers
watch us
while the devil
beats his wife
in the rain.
The air lacks jazz.
It's filled with the absent sound of strings
and accordion wind winding
with slow train motion.
We join the lost roamers in silence.
Words on tombstones overcrowd the silence,
clamoring recognition for names of the dead.
Flowers try to escape statue embraces
with restless child motion
and run along streets that cover every corner
of the map that doesn't explain
where the hidden violin players play
their endless music to the applause of rain.
Old women huddle out of the rain
inside open mausoleums in silence,
remembering
when they were shaped like violins.
They reminisce of old, devilish lovers
and admire the dead.
Puzzling, one flicks drizzle off her map
with a quick, dismissing motion.
Our eyes remain in motion
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under the angel rain.
We have no map
and search in silence
for famous artists, all dead,
who wait for sympathetic, serenading violins.
But I no longer play the violin;
my hands have learned a different type of motion.
I think that we are the least tragic of lovers,
not being dead
and whose only hardship is to walk in the rain,
happily,
under an umbrella of silence,
using each other as a map.
We lack the performer's right to bow.
Death is an invisible bow
that plays the fifth fiddle string.
Death is the blackest silence
that obscures all motion.
Through it
you saw the fire
behind the rain,
saw the day render itself dead.
We use the dead
as an outdated map
of our success
and use rain
as the saddest violin song
to keep us in motion
and save us from silence.
- Kat Isacson
*A sestina a type of poetic form which repeats words at the end of each line in rotating sequence. There are other restrictions to this form, but that's the rule that is still noticeable here, I think.
For you, a trip to a cemetery is:
