CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S GRAVE

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S GRAVE

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S GRAVE

How do you bury a poet?

Surely not
how they buried Baudelaire
thrown in with his parents
like an infant death.

It stretches
to a ghastly irony
Pasternak’s remark
that poets should remain
children.

Do poets really want to trade
the lingering savour
of experience
for guileless eyes?

There’s something
repulsive
about an empty fresh
adult face.

Such baby faces
can be seen in uniform
or with a foot
on a slaughtered tiger.

They can be capable
of anything
or a long lullaby
of nothing.

I want to exhume Baudelaire
and give him his own
magnificent mercurial vault.

From one angle
an arching ebony cat.
From another
sneering black marble
spleen.

No poet
dead or alive
should rot
with their parents.