…spending time under Paris is not for everyone, but…can provide an antidote to the surplus of beauty 
that is found above ground.—The New York Times, May 3, 2011

What do you know of beauty
or ghoulishness, of the distance
from our individual graveyards
through the winding dark of Paris,
the priests’ whispery, secret bodies
carting us in pieces, air cooling 
as we descended this underworld of tunnels
and chambers, down stairs hacked
in limestone by human hands?

What surplus of pleasure
to have my long bones lain across
those of others as I longed
in moments of dread to drape myself
across the proximate laps of strangers.
Pile high our femurs and humeri!
Cross my ulna with the radius 
of another and place them 
where someone’s chin would have been
had the cartilage held.

These corridors of bone send back the slap
of summer sandals, little sighs
of separate, stifled sorrows, the sound
air makes as you move apart.
It’s true, our arches have collapsed,
tarsals, metatarsals tossed near the back
with all that does not stack easily.
Vertebral columns do not rise, 
but scatter. Scapulae and ilia
cast their shadowed wings.

We languish in our piles and pity you 
the distal alignments of the living.