Debora Greger

Paris, City of the Dead

I

Later, down below, there would appear an angel
of darkness in the hard winter light,
the day turning cold, too cold for snow:

Sunday afternoon on the Place Pigalle,
a woman clad in scraps of black leather
would tower above me, bending as low

as her stilettos allowed. It was nothing personal.
What good to her now was Toulouse-Lautrec,
known in the brothels of Paris as the Coffeepot?

What good Degas and the dancing girls he chalked?
The dead weren’t much of an audience,
so she hunted the living. Across from the Sexodrome,

she would lay her hand lightly on my shoulder
and promise the two of us something
my high-school French classes hadn’t covered.

II

It was all downhill from there.
The street became a bridge over a city
within a city: the cemetery of Montmartre.

In that underworld beneath an overpass,
stone houses lined cobbled streets just wide enough
for a hearse. The lanes bore their names on signs

so the living wouldn’t get lost,
and yet, somehow we took a wrong turn
on the way from Nijinsky to Truffaut.

Each house had a door for a front wall,
and sometimes, in the tiny room inside,
an old kitchen chair, so you could sit

and follow with a finger the tracery
of names and dates carved into the walls.
In the bare bones of the trees

magpies rattled like professional mourners.
Ravens screamed that we weren’t wanted.
A cat the dingy gray of the oldest tombs

slunk out from behind one, saw me, and turned
to stone. Even artificial flowers shivered.
O children deported fifty years ago,

there is a marker for you here now,
where you never played. Your stone is still as clean
as if just washed with tears, starched and ironed.

On it pebbles have been laid, as is the custom
of your people, though your ashes fell
somewhere else, unmarked, even colder.

DEBORA GREGER is the author of several books of poetry, the most recent of which, God, was published by Penguin in 2001. Her latest effort, Western Art, will come out in 2004.

“Paris, City of the Dead” appears in our Winter 2003 issue.

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