Past
Jim Morrison’s Grave
By
Jonathan Falk
There
was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.
Come,
let us drink wine, let us drink wine of the city of Rey, if we do not drink
now, when should we drink?
Pilgrimage sanguine, kings queens house smoking in the wind, eternal pattern of canals
crossing, neti flush wombed out the center.
This is an anapest, hasta la Victoria siempre. Come, let us drink wine of the city of
Rey. Remembrance of Times past need I
read to re-read, Swann’s Way only read, to the cinders of the dead. Crow’s hooves widely thunder, wise guy sweeping
the dawn. Bergson sneezed in the
terminal, a small death in the summer to be. Windmills sanguine, blister skies
of Breslau, the gate’s closed. Busker
tout marionette waving at me, ecstasy, leafblowers quiet staggering
Communards. Their wall, I came here, why
did you go there? Why? The Vikings or the Quislings?
Takes an instant to spot the roses circling the hall
of the lizard king, knees folded scraped confined. That box is too damn small, mouth pear,
sidereal disorder, white thread tree silt Eluard’s slab, Maebashi-like, staff
of the seeker to Hearn. Hedayat’s not easy to find, like Cortez fanned
cornea out when I stopped. How’s the
lodestone to monocular the writer’s onyx pyramid? That can’t be him, no it is him, “he died too
soon.” We’re in war with them phantoms,
compared slides on the Blind Owl, Caspian saint cornhusker. Tube chimney argent memory Dam square, robes of glory. The little sparrow the Strasbourgians next seek, I’d already seen her Grecian urn, a spot staked a little over the
stupas of walled mortality, clustered in groves. Roses darkened to hymns, I forget to bring
from Helian’s grave an Austrian dirt cylinder.
Peeling orgone hinges, crustacean columbine cirrus, seeds encompassing
the mausoleum.
Loie Fuller veils, scalloped mastodon flood, a
little box of crumbled monocle tissue.
All this there is? I take photos to remember them by, the stations of the cross to the fane, walked five
miles to get to old Father Lachaise himself, unsure about the Metro process,
train stop requisitioned by the Francos and by the Prussians, 1871, stiff
collars halt crepuscular breezes, whinny of clock pendulum. Grandfather Izambard, I fall back on the
Metro, Pigalle the spleen, stop Stalingrad.
Some big stelae there, theirs are monumental. The oracles of tuned planchettes, clam stems
febrile in the piles of tombs, Oscar Chopin, erotic politics, is this all there
is? Mortified tissue buzzes, an Aeolian
harp of formaldehyde. All the dead
flouted, upright incense petrified, yodeling above the abyss. A funeral marching away, sachem’s casket
strutted on shoulders, hush of pinions.
22 Feb. 2014
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