au recherche de temps pendu

This is part of an experimental series of poems wherein I try to write from a speaker's perspective that isn't, well, me. One thing about writing a poem every day is you can do all sorts of experiments and series and series-within-series -- or so I'm attempting to discover. Tell me what you think! Tell your friends.

Love.
T


Poem for Les Poetes Maudits

You stub out your cigarettes and put them in your pockets
with fistfuls of matches
stripped clean at the edges.
You didn’t see me, you were transfixed by something,
maybe the light's coronets on the hedges.
I let my heels speak for me
in perfect meter,
I didn’t call out to you,
but remembered the Cimitière
des Batignolles,
where we admired the graves
of Breton and Verlaine,
and the dirty saint turned her head and clasped
her stone hands in her lap.
Fifteen hundred graves
thicker than spruce thorns,
catching the light on the thick rims of the stones.
We had nothing to leave them,
how could we leave them, the poets, in their stone houses,
enchained by flowers?
But today I can believe Verlaine could die,
and did die, once,
listing splendidly away from the sun,
and on a day Verlaine could die
with his saturnine poems, his excess, I too
can hurry away from you.