Stein 3 Feb, 1874 – 27 July, 1946


 

You are here in the ground of

Pere Lachaise beneath a stone

big enough to hold you down.  The space

around you is full of names you’d know,
Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, Modigliani, de Nerval,

Perec, Proust, Pissarro, Wilde, Appolinaire, Alice B.

This is no humble place, it’s a city.

To get around you need a map.

 

Given what you did I expected uproar like Morrison gets.

Sad-eyed  ladies of the lowlands, young men

with revolution inside their heads.  But there’s nothing.

It’s as if you’d not changed the twentieth at all

challenged its serial monogamy made it

ripple with how the brain turns.
There’s no bramble nor trees near you,

no ivy growing across your name.

Just a rose someone has left,

shrivelled  now,  and a stone in the

shape of a heart dropped  above

where yours might be.

 

Old and young and gone and gone

it’s forever ever and ever forever just like this.

 

Peter Finch

 

 

 


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