Ron Padgett’s "At Apollinaire’s Tomb" is a meditation on literary legacy, memory, and the strange, shifting presence of the past. The poem reads like a quiet séance, a moment of communion with Guillaume Apollinaire, the avant-garde poet and art critic whose influence rippled through Surrealism, Dada, and modernist poetry. Padgett approaches the visit to Apollinaire’s grave with a mix of reverence, curiosity, and the surreal humor that Apollinaire himself might have appreciated. The poem begins with an acknowledgment of Apollinaire’s premature death, a lament that feels both personal and historical:
"The death of Guillaume Apollinaire still calls forth feelings of sorrow and loss, sorrow for his death at a relatively early age and loss for the extraordinary works he might have written."
There is nothing extravagant in this mourning—just the simple, unembellished regret that every admirer of a great artist eventually experiences. The phrase "extraordinary works he might have written" carries a quiet ache, the impossible wish to know what more Apollinaire had in him, what remained unwritten. But then the speaker’s mind takes a playful detour:
"It is jolting to realize that if he had lived as long as, say, Eubie Blake did, I could go see him this very moment! Across the ocean, an aged but vital Gui…"
This hypothetical reimagining of Apollinaire as an elderly contemporary, still alive, jolts the poem from the funereal into the absurd. Eubie Blake, the American ragtime pianist and composer, lived to be nearly 100. Had Apollinaire done the same, the speaker might have taken a plane to visit him rather than standing at his grave. The sentence trails off—"an aged but vital Gui…"—as if the thought itself collapses under the weight of its own impossibility. But the reality is unavoidable:
"He is over there, of course. Six feet under."
The bluntness of this line undercuts the fantasy. The grave cannot be rewritten, only visited. The poem then shifts to the peculiar details of Apollinaire’s burial, citing Blaise Cendrars, a writer and close friend of Apollinaire, who recalled how the location of the grave was nearly lost in the confusion of the cemetery. The detail of the misplaced identity—"a few minutes after the burial no one knew which of two similar graves held the coffin of Lieutenant Apollinaire"—suggests that even in death, Apollinaire’s presence was elusive, unstable. And then Cendrars’ own vision, almost comic in its surrealism:
"when he looked down he was transfixed by a clump of turf that bore a perfect resemblance to Apollinaire: had exactly the form of Apollinaire."
It is both ridiculous and profound. The poet is gone, yet he emerges again, even in the shape of the grass. The dead do not fully disappear—they reassemble, resurface, distort, take new forms. Padgett acknowledges that other poets have made the pilgrimage: "We are all drawn to that grave." This is not just personal obsession but collective devotion. Apollinaire’s grave is a magnet for poets, a point of poetic energy that others—Allen Ginsberg, Michael Brownstein—have also tried to translate into words. Then, the narrative shifts to 1965. Padgett is at Père Lachaise, the famed Parisian cemetery. His description—"a magnificently odd cemetery that put me at ease by its surprising lightness and pleasantness"—sets an unexpected mood. Cemeteries are often associated with darkness and sorrow, but this one feels airy, almost inviting. He arrives at the gravesite of Wilhelm de Kostrowitsky—Apollinaire’s birth name, a reminder of his Polish heritage and how identities, like graves, shift and blur over time. Then, the moment of eerie recognition:
"That wonderful pearly gray French light streamed down over everything."
The scene is bathed in soft, diffuse illumination. Padgett observes the "crudely hewn headstone" that seems out of place, still strangely modern. And then, something shifts:
"Then, slowly, a soft image appeared on it, the image of a cross."
This is a quiet but startling revelation. The cross was "so lightly cut in the stone" that it was almost imperceptible until the light made it visible. This subtle apparition unsettles the speaker—not with fear, but with something deeper, more reverent. Then, a vision:
"And when I looked back down at the ground I saw Apollinaire tilt up toward me straight as a board. He drifted right up through the ground."
This is the poem’s most surreal moment, its brief slip into the supernatural. Apollinaire rises—not as a decaying corpse, but "straight as a board," an image that is stiff, unnatural, and oddly humorous. The floating, unembodied presence feels closer to an optical illusion than a ghostly visitation. The speaker reacts not with terror, but with a simple, bodily recognition:
"I felt my heart give a little jump, but I wasn’t afraid."
The encounter is strange but not menacing, eerie but not sinister. Apollinaire does not speak, does not linger. He is there, and then:
"I looked around. He was gone. Everything looked the same. Well, sort of."
This last phrase—"Well, sort of."—delivers the final, quiet revelation. The world has not visibly changed, yet it has. Something has shifted, imperceptibly but undeniably. "At Apollinaire’s Tomb" is not just about visiting a grave—it is about the way the past hovers at the edge of perception, how the dead slip in and out of view. Padgett’s journey to Père Lachaise becomes an encounter not just with Apollinaire, but with the strange persistence of memory, the way certain figures refuse to stay buried. The poem moves from intellectual reflection to physical sensation, from literary history to something much less definable: an impression, a moment, a lightness in the air that makes everything feel slightly different. The dead poet rises, then vanishes, but something of him remains, in the stone, in the grass, in the faint shifting of light, in the quiet space where the living and the dead nearly meet.
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