The Devil Never Sleeps by Andrei Codrescu Read Free Book Online Page B

as a tombstone, and a waiter must have a true blue-blooded client as well as a tombstone. For myself, the pleasure of eating in an old restaurant is intimately linked to the comfort of death. “Ah,” I think to myself at Antoine’s, or Commander’s Palace, or any of the grand establishments, “One hundred years ago a man sat where I sit now, had a fine meal, and died.” This makes me inexpressibly happy. I feel that my pleasure is authorized by continuity, that it is not ephemeral the way it is in all those horrid, brand-spanking-new, automobile-riddled, and soullless clusters that pass for cities in America.
    I have visited dead poets in famous cemeteries and found them at work. In the Protestant cemetery in Rome John Keats lies under a tombstone that does not bear his name. “This grave contains all that was mortal of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET who on his death bed in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired These Words to be Engraven on his Tombstone: Here Lies One Whose Name is Writ in Water. February 24 th 1821.” A lyre-shaped tree shadows the grave and shelters the cats of Rome, who love these grounds. Walt Whitman planned his monument, which
rests in Camden, New Jersey, in a circular grove of oaks. The tomb cost Whitman more than his house. On the grave of Guillaume Apollinaire in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris there is a poem in the shape of an upside-down heart made from the words: MON COEUR PAREIL A UNE FLAMME RENVERSÉE (My Heart Like an Upside-Down Flame).
    Tombstones are essential tools of poetry. I am not speaking only of the tombstones of poets, which are of course professional tools, but all tombstones. New Orleans cemeteries are among the most poetic I have ever visited. They are a mother lode for poets, and I have taken my students to them on many an occasion. Cemeteries bring out the storytellers in people. My friend James Nolan, a New Orleans—born poet who lived for many years in Spain and San Francisco, returned here and began writing stories about his family tomb. In New Orleans, he told me, the dead lead an active afterlife. They are invoked frequently, remembered often, and sometimes seen. More important, they speak to the living and aren’t really shy about it.
    The voodoo religion, which is a mix of African worship and Catholic rite, takes the dead very seriously. Offerings are made at gravesites, and the dead are addressed with the greatest respect. The tomb of Marie Laveau, the so-called Voodoo Queen who popularized this practice in the late nineteenth century, is often festooned with charred bones, half- empty glasses of rum, cigars that have been a little smoked, coins, feathers, and prayer-poems. In the French Quarter courtyard of one of my friends, a stone voodoo shrine is mysteriously attended every full moon. The worshippers leave behind offerings, but my friend has never been able to see them, though he has waited and watched.
    It is important that one get to one’s final resting place in vivid and memorable fashion. In New Orleans, the jazz funerals of important members of the black community are shining models of respect and remembrance. The deceased is seen off by musical bands, followed by dancing friends, acquaintances, and strangers. The throng sways under twirling yellow and black umbrellas, accompanying the deceased as near to the next world as it is possible for the living. Surely, by showing their affection in this way, they now have a friend in the next world. I once followed such a procession, without a clue as to who the departed was, and when we got to the cemetery, a man told us, “You have one trumpet on your side when you go.” It turned out the man was a trumpeteer. I don’t have my own waiter at Antoine’s, but I have a trumpet in heaven.

 
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    Another Autumn

    Niciodata nu fu toamna mai frumoasa sufletului nostru doritor de moarte.

    Autumn was never this splendid to