​PÈRE LACHAISE


Leaves clatter down cobblestones like tin cups,
and empty souls move about the Sunday-children
who laugh and chase each other down
the cobblestones, chattering after themselves
they give a half-life to this city
of images, human and divine,
where no one lives, and no one dies,
where families collect their young
at the end of their visit, and leave this place
to the leaves that swirl in wheels . . .

When Mars, the Gorgons, Lamia,
and the warheads are sleeping,
and I am vacant, no longer thinking,
when all things are absent
you arrive, a ghost anthology written in the dark
of other lives; lovers and lovers’ art.​