LE CAFÉ-BAR DE PÈRE LACHAISE
The cobbled street is slick with the morning’s rain.
My Solex moped slips slightly as I brake
in front of the café-bar. I dismount,
and hurry in. The place is full of smoke –
Gitanes and Gauloise, the odd cigarillo,
pipes – and lookalikes – Simone Signoret,
for example, over there, with Jean Gabin.
The radio is playing ‘Sous les toits
de Paris’. Maurice Chevalier sings,
‘Nous sommes seules ici-bas.’ I remove
my wet cape, and shudder, remembering
walking the paths of the cemetery
in the rain at dawn, searching for hours
in Père Lachaise for a grave I could not find.
I notice there is only one seat free –
in the furthest corner next to a man
with a pipe who might be Jean-Paul Sartre
perhaps or even Georges Simenon.
I hang my cape on the pegs near the bar,
order a Ricard, and make my way
to the corner. Sartre-Simenon looks up,
takes his pipe from his mouth and points, with its stem,
to the empty chair. “Merci, monsieur,” I say.
I sit. On the radio Yves Montand
is singing ‘Les Feuilles Mortes’. The double-double,
pointing to the sandy mud on my shoes,
asks if I found the grave I was looking for.
In response to my surprise, ‘Voilà’, he says,
pointing to his own shoes, and the floor tiles
bestrewn with the same detritus, and then
at the other lookalikes in the café-bar.
‘Nous en avons tous marre,’ he says. Each one
is silent, introspective, as Montand sings,
‘Et la mer efface sur le sable.’
Harvey Lillywhite
March 28, 2025Lovely names from the past, not to mention lovely graves by the sea in the mud. What does searching for a grave and not finding it mean? So many have died. Maybe we’re the ones buried? Ha. Wish I could be in that cafe.
Harvey Lillywhite
March 28, 2025Loved hearing the old names….Oh, but how it drapes itself, this poem, in the mist of recollection! It shimmers—Parisian rain glossing cobbles, the smoke curling, the moped slipping, all conjured with the precise inevitability of memory. It breathes of absinthe and intellect, of lost footsteps in Père Lachaise, of figures half-formed, half-felt—Simone, Sartre, Simenon—faces glimpsed through fogged glass. And the words, too, fold into themselves, carrying the music of Montand, the weariness of exile, the ceaseless search. What does it mean when we can’t find the grave we seek? The man wanders through the graveyard by the sea. The name he seeks always just beyond the next row, shifting, rearranging itself in the salt-heavy air. Perhaps we are the ones who are missing, not the grave. HA.
John Huddart
March 29, 2025Masterpiece!