This poem is called Complaint of the Grandparents.
Complaint because I wish to acknowledge,
do a little act of homage to Laforgue, whose complaints
I hope you know.
The poem begins with a little epigraph in fact
from one of the Laforgue complaints, which
goes like this.
Les morts c'est sous terre, ca n'en sort, guere.
Which, being translated roughly, is something like this.
The dead are underground.
They don't go out.
I want you to hear the rhythm.
It's slightly jazzy for the French of the period.
Complaint of the Grandparents.
Our diaries squat, toad-like, on dark closet ledges.
Forget-me-not and thistle decalcomaned the pages.
But where, where can they be now?
The delicate squalors of our between-wars parlors?
Sad ferns and the sunlight spilt like soda on torporous rugs,
the photo albums all outspread.
The dead don't get around much anymore.
There was an hour when daughters practiced arpeggios.
Their mothers, awkward and proud,
would listen, smoothing their hose.
Sundays, half past 5:00.
Do you recall how the sun used to loll lazily just
beyond the roof, bloodshot and aloof?
We thought it would never set.
The dead don't get around much anymore.
Eternity resembles a long Sunday afternoon.
No traffic passes; the cigar smoke coils in a blue cocoon.
Children, have you nothing for our cold sakes?
No tea, no little teacakes?
Sometimes now the rains disturb even our remote suburb.
There's a dampness underground.
The dead don't get around much anymore.