R D Parker
BATS
Roosting in the cracks of railway tunnels,
the bats of Paris sleep through the day. Pipistrelles.
Evening song bats. Night after night
they fly the same path, foraging.
Late into the night, night after night, Gertrude Stein toils hard.
Late into the night, deep in the grey catacombs
of the resurrected city, Stein sulks over smudged manuscripts.
A rose arose to revivify Vivian. Vivian came from darkness
and dragged herself and all those around her, even Josephus,
into the purgatory of dreamless sleep. It is late in the night.
It is late in the winter. In the thawing squalor of empty beds
sultry platitudes sting Stein’s bloodshot, puffy eyes. Pride goeth before
the morning. Josephus too huffs and he puffs, but the dour dawn
will not stall Parisian sorcery. Josephus goes in search of quiet.
Amidst the faux zeros and the rankling cluck cluck cluck
of indefatigable doves, trapped in Baron Haussmann’s
echo of peace and procrastination, Josephus moans
(bitter and stuporous with self-pity) and goes in search
of quiet. Scalded, scalded, scalded are the shadows
of the apocalypse. Vivian dreamt at last that Stein’s center of gravity
sunk down down and down, numbering smugness among the scams
of color-coded commodification recycled as amphibious intellectuality.
Late into the night, night after night, Gertrude Stein toils hard.
Late into the night, in the limestone catacombs
of the labyrinthine city, she sulks over her smudged manuscripts.
A rose arose to revivify Vivian. Vivian came from darkness
and dragged all those around her, even Josephus,
into the paralysis of dreamless sleep.
The bats of Paris sleep through the day,
roosting in the cracks of tunnels and stone buildings.
Pipistrelles. Evening song bats. Night after night,
they fly the same path, foraging.
Do cats eat bats?
At Père Lachaise, the graves of Oscar Wilde,
Marcel Proust, Hélöise and Abelard, Jim Morrison,
Balzac, Daumier, Chopin, Piaf, Richard Wright,
and Gertrude Stein are overrun with cats. Why?
Pause, traveler, and ponder, you who know
no better than to gloat because you still trudge forgettably
across the earth you will return to: because cats eat rats.
Josephus supposes he might lunch at le Drouot.
Six rats skitter across a tombstone.
Six poplars line the avenue.
Six swans sulk in the Seine.
Six alleys converge on the dusty boulevard
that Josephus favors for his dawn promenade.
Will he go again, this time, to le Jardin du Luxembourg?
Will he turn his face from the cold
and unforgiving statues of the stately queens?
As Josephus strolls along the boulevard,
six maladies shiver up his stately spine.
At that same moment, six maladies shiver up the spine of Stein.
They petrify the hissing of her plump and stately pen.
She squints, and her prose slurs: Viviaaaaan, Viviaaaaaan.
Unseen, six tiny pipistrelles swoop into the abandoned tunnel.
Josephus toils up six flights of narrowing stairs.
Hunched in his low-ceilinged room, he writes. We are alone,
he writes. A hundred weeds blot the darkening ground.
A hundred stones crumble into earth with imperceptible slowness.
Unseen, a hundred insects toil at our feet.
A hundred chimneys mask the blazing of a hundred stars.
Copyright © RD Parker 2015
RD Parker writes poems in more than one style. He has recent work in Long Poem Magazine, LEVELER, and other journals.