Wilde's Tomb

But these, thy lovers are not dead.…They will rise up and hear your voice. . .. and run to kiss your mouth. –The Sphinx In the garden of Père Lachaise, city of the dead, we passed angels covering their faces in shame, & nineteenth-century trees, with tops bowed as if their only purpose was to grieve, & crossed the Transversales to Wilde’s grave. When lovers leave, they leave their kisses glistening on the gray slab, on impressions of lips themselves, a tissue of strangers’ cells the conservators cannot leave alone, & scrub the graffiti, as the plaque decrees by law, no one can deface this tomb, & still the images of lips remain, dark gray stains of animal fat imprisoned in limestone. Lips are pressed as high as lovers climb, against the Sphinx’s ridiculous headdress, on the carved trumpet of fame, & on the cheeks of its voracious face of mindless passion flying with eyes pinched tight, that some farsighted lover tried to open with lines from a red pen, like a blepharoplasty, while others kissed its sybaritic mouth to make a poem a prophecy. So here is love alive surviving the wreckage it survives, a lipstick envelope of hearts on their flight to some other place, less aware, more receiving, a final Champ de Grâce.