KIM ADDONIZIO Existential Elegy

Maybe everyone is walking around thinking something abstract and ontological

like The existence of others as a freedom defines my situation

and is even the condition of my own freedom. Maybe de Beauvoir

opens her notebook & writes it as soon as she sits down at the Deux Magots.

Life is inherently meaningless, probably thinks Sartre, across from her at the table,

studying the waiter. The chef savagely prepares a tart for its destruction.

Yet the street lamps blink on without thinking Light, then nothing…

as the booksellers along the Seine close their metal boxes.

Humming, a woman pulls her damp dress from a basket,

then clothespins her simulacrum to the line.

So maybe not everyone. Maybe I can just lie here on the couch & pet the cat

the rest of the afternoon. He seems troubled

ever since the other one died. He won’t chase that snaky rainbow thing

when I drag it over the carpet. What is he thinking? Snaky rainbow things

are but fleeting pleasures distracting us from the terror of the void that awaits us?

My first & only time in Paris was thirty years ago. It was February, & snowing.

I wandered Montparnasse cemetery while heady thoughts flurried

from the clouds, wet my face & disappeared. Everyone I loved was still alive.

Paris is still there. The bouquinistes too—rare editions & magazines, postcards, souvenirs.

The Deux Magots is still there. But now, supposedly, everyone interesting goes to the Flore.

Look at them, alive in this poem, holding their menus & about to disappear.

De Beauvoir weeps as Sartre’s lowered in.

from New England Review