watching skylines die or the taller our tombs
By Vincent A. Cellucci
we are merely tourists above ground
I am reminded one morning in montparnasse cemetery
searching for markers in the fog with my new family
three generations foraging up front me trailing
reunited with my 82-year old mentor mary
the professor who took me to paris
first and taught me the books
written by the people now written in stone
their stillness is accentuated by the displeasure
of my infant son squirming in his stroller
yelping to be constantly held
how human needs are bookended
twice we have to stop and fidget with all the apparatus
we have to prove we are parents
or to at least console him to rest in a place
that causes more mature mortals unrest
but apparently not mary
this late in life she eagerly pulls out her phone
to start our author scavenger hunt
by exhuming an e-map from a box of plots on a guidepost
along the way she provides no afterword
to the lipstick smooches on sartre and simone’s shared grave
mary asks if I have a metro ticket to make an offering
many visits she had students takes selfies with these crypts
I look up and see a black skyscraper backing headstones and pillars
I comment to her that it’s just a taller grave
especially after being abandoned due to covid
after searching my memory for skylines
nearest to me to hear their last breaths
I turn and find no furrowed gray brow
behind mary’s bright blue spectacles
indicating a morbid obsession shadows me alone
we pass a burial in the midst of our game
in the cold bare hands clasped a wooden casket
laid out like a place setting before a fine meal
we pushed our stroller around the hearse
and through the fallen mounds of leaves
behind an oddly unsullen funeral party because
vallejo was neighbor to this new deposit
to the real estate of the departed
we pay the peruvian poet our respects
and double back to the path where a man passes
with two grocery bags of leeks for soup I imagine
straight through the cemetery must be his fastest route
from the produce market to his kitchen
I construct a prayer: may someone daily pass by your grave
with a bag of food to lovingly prepare
that’s the thing about cemeteries in the middle of the city
they are inhabited and not just by strangers
or book worms that never cease devouring
tzara is last on our list and a visit to the daddy of dada
seems requisite as andrei my graduate mentor
went so far as to name his son after
this avant-garde poet so I should introduce toulouse
if not for andrei I wouldn’t have understood dada’s “nothing”
but the grave proves as elusive as the word
because I am only looking for vertical tombs
amongst this corner block of crypts
instead of tristan’s supine stone
eventually I find his ledger bed by spotting
the collage of cut out newsprint titles
my family and mary are patient as I
leave a note with my son’s scribbles
captioned by my absurd word: “zebradangle”
but they have grown past ready
concerned only to find lunch
—
About Author
Vincent A. Cellucci wrote Absence Like Sun (Lavender Ink, 2019) and An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press, 2011). He edited Fuck Poems an exceptional anthology (Lavender Ink, 2012). He also has three collaborative titles: come back river (Finishing Line Press, 2014); _a ship on the line (Unlikely Books, 2014), which was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award; and the recently released ~getting away with everything (Unlikely Books, 2021). Vincent performed Diamonds in Dystopia, an interactive poetry web app at SXSW in 2017, and the poem was anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing 2018. He works at the TU Delft Library.
Author’s Socials:
Website: vincentacellucci.com
Facebook URL: www.facebook.com/vincent.cellucci
Twitter: @theexceptionali