Catacombs

The narrow slab above the door
in dire masonry reads:

And so, a hundred stairs below
the surface of Montparnasse and
past the lintel,
where Charles the Tenth once held
his orgiastic revels, lanterns casting
elongated shadows of couplings across the ceilings,
and where the Brave of France
hatched sweet requital on their Nazi hosts,
living unwashed, unlawful, and
baptized in their cause by the seeping Parisian waters
dripping from those ceilings onto their Gallic heads,
and dripping onto bones piled in careful stacks,
human bones, transported centuries before on carts
at night from Les Halles cemeteries
to this underground sepulcher –
stacks of femur and tibia,
dotted with the vacant stare and ever-locked grimace
of skulls – millions here,
hundreds to the fore –
the walls, patterns and textures borne of bones
for miles – a morbid display
of the futile bauble of individuality –
I breathe in the dusting motes of
six million who came before –
and I close my eyes to rest them from this realization.
And opening them again, I sit,
hours later, in a Les Halles club –
cigarette hazes threading the space –
dim, pinkish light
casting its faint pinkness on skins –
a bumping, deadly dance-beat
rippling the smoke, the pink,
with its sonic waves of requiem –
the locked smiles of skulls and vacuous, searching sockets
hidden
beneath the fleshy masses of lips and cheeks and lids,
hundred to the fore,
all lining the walls in this new, uncautioning empire –
the carts,
with their ghostly pilots,
just outside,
waiting to load again
and carry back to Montparnasse.