60.

Those catacombs, stacked with skulls and bones

For over two hundred years, where the Resistance

Hid as the Nazis ruled Paris, are they places

For poetry or an inventory the heart

Can’t abide? The green near Lyon

Is gaudy beside the dry Midi

I left behind. How does rain affect

The way we bury the dead? Masses

Of the living, their absent traces

Yet so palpable even when the songs

They sang their children are long gone.

Time has disembodied them, and poets

And lovers are not exempt, even

As their words seem to dance for a while longer.