A Morning Cloak butterfly, maroon wet with the paint of morning, cat paws thin filament leaves astride a larder of memories.
Dalliance with the past, smoke grey these architects of memory the privet hedge, lone pine tree, jet black caterpillar poised about a green carrot top trigger laced in emperor's gold like fathoms of the sea held ... in quiet repose.
Angel Inn, come off a sign blown sideways in the sugar and ices night.
Old St. Joseph's Cathedral, bottom of the hill, here Andrew Marvell of "coy mistress" fame sports a plaque remembering "time's winged chariot" and farther (further!) up a quaint pub gives accolades (Kudos, too) to the fact, 1666 nefariously was the plague year in London--Parliament Hill, a brief arm stretch away, posited strangled chickens and other assorted heirlooms in vain attempt for poesy to thwart poxy.
A stone's throw off in Hampstead Heath guns (Big Berthas) could be heard from the Somme, German derigibles dropped incendiaries, the wounded entrained at Charing Cross and a rascallion
(John Keats by name) drained a draught at Jack Straw's Castle near the Spaniards while Turpin's hanged corpse was soon to resemble good English oaker casks at the Flask.
Poltergeist activity --the sun winding like a staircase onto the pavement, rickety afternoon shooting back thru shawls of the city.
Tippy-toe. Curtains ajar, a face at the cross-roads looking, looking for all the world as pavement stones, greasy & black, a thin oiled compliment to Mrs. Blight registered at Old Inn Road.
The day I went to LaFayette's grave, the concierge became our tour guide amid an old ruin of tombstones including bedraggled de Tocqueville's crypt (and he, heir apparant of America, too).
There, too, the odd City of St. Louis tribute Fayettevilles after yet another "Saint" Louis, despoiler of the Jews--both sitting, squat and apparant, in summer dust, so shingle-flat, mindful of Place De La Nation, more blood-letting blocks away (so the aristocracy might be healed). A chapel nun then reached in loud silence for our Lord, her black habit / upraised hands forming a brilliant crucifix against sky and altar.
Some francs exchanged hands (Monsieur le keeper, after all, obliged us by opening a private cemetery, après heures), the graves looked so wretched-- death stylized in military formation, row on row, every private carrying a field marshall's baton only this time of mortality's making, crestfallen, no Agile Lapin/Moulin Rouge here, in the joyless, little garden (not a bird sang), our old Frenchman narrating/marching on in The Old Guard, Grand Armée fashion a little Napoleonic his cemetery, his brandy like his suspender buttons lost to recent antiquity.