CHARD DE NIORD

Descent

I milked the smoke of my last cigarette
before I went with them, the beautiful
girls who came for me to take me down
across the river.
                                       Ordered me to remove
my clothes at each infernal floor,
and then my skin at the lowest level.

I saw you on a dock in Venice board
his yacht with the too unearthly name,
Queen of Heaven.
                                       We had dreamed
of sitting here at a table beneath
an umbrella, lilacs at the center,
resuming our quarrel about whether
the British had been immoral
in ending sati.
                                       You said they had.
I said they hadn't.
We had dreamed
that the terrace of our cafe was also
a barge and we were floating around
the world from one great city to another.

You were beautiful in the way
you turned around to look at me.
I see you still in that position
of moving forward but looking back.

It seems strangely right in this bardo bar
where no one drinks that this occurred.
That I must go on speaking to you to live again,
of only briefly, as I'm doing now.
To sing to you at the end about the lilacs.
How in their briefest bloom they last forever
on the tables in Venice.
                                       In the gardens of hell.

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