Excerpts From The Book

With definitions of historic solemnity
tempered by fires of mortality
in the pooled blood
out on Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne
a squalid street dating back to the
middle ages
has become a Ravens Rookery
of unfrequented impasse
with some personal history
whose secrets harbor
Spirits of the dead
that hold steadfast
a faith in rebirth
toil with deliberation
upon an operation
of a painful deformity

Beautiful Chimeras
Sonnets which require no introduction
absorbs Nerval’s visage in “oriental clarity”
visiting through the morning hour
leaving behind a ruby stain upon the forehead
of the beloved poet
from pressed lips of a Queen
accompanied by the strum of
Orpheus’s lyre
so beautiful in the dew dropped arbor
of “intertwined vine branch and rose.”

Silence at the center of
outrage and prayer
Beneath the high hat
in a stitched up black frock
once donned for galas
his gentle smile
a bottle of ink
pen and passport,
scraps of paper in his coat pockets
where the dead poet
Gérard de Nerval
slumps in the loneliest corner
against a damp wall
of Rue de la Vieille Lanterne,
and meditates in the coming dawn
his pupils deep and fixed with rigor mortis
are one with the universe
in this, his masterpiece of silence.