Hotel des Invalides, The Fifth of May, 2000

HÔTEL DES INVALIDES, THE FIFTH OF MAY

Beneath the domed cage the Italian boy flutters
Crashing into me as he impatiently flaps
Trying to fly from this cold mausoleum

The man with the medals
From some lost colony
Looms overhead and commands the unwilling subordinate,
Young man, take off your hat,

Don’t you know you’re in a
Place where there is
Still a Napoleon?

And the Family flocks around
Beneath our feet
Laying wreaths at his feet
The man who would be minister is even there
High priest at the altar of bees and violets

His wife would like to leave
(She’s an agnostic, after all.)
But his gesture to bade her stay echoes,

Don’t you know
You’re in a place where
There is still a Napoleon?

And the trumpets echo their eternal refrain
And the drum rolls out its knell
And the echoes of the echoes
Repeat that War is Hell

For they know as they have known
As the centuries have passed
And funeral marches of tourists circling from their chariots
Cannot fathom the heroic mystery

Don’t they know they’re
In a place where there is still a
Napoleon?

And I smile through the Beethoven inside me
I am translating Shelley into French
Singing Mon nom est Ozymandias,

Roi des rois

Surveillez mes oeuvres, vous les puissants
Et désesperez-vous...

And the tourist-herd despairs me--
They do not know that this is also still a place
Where there is a Ferdinand Foch
Who, after the August guns had fallen silent
Four score ago, so trenchantly
Told him who loved War to

Rest
In
Peace

In
Æternum

For the world could do without that place
Where there has always been a Napoleon
Before which the Führer bowed
And still the leaders follow the Pied Piper’s fife and drum.

Outside
They wait in wheelchairs
For the Princess Napoleon
To annoint them with baubles legion

He would shake her hand
If he had one

In the last days of what was supposed to be the last war
He pulled the pin
But the innocents stayed his hand
And his humanity has mutilated him
He is far from the last in a long bleeding line
He is a coup de canon
That flattens me
And silences them all

Don’t you know
We’re in a world
Where there is still a Napoleon?