Is this how it was? You were going,
incipient, pedagogical, to Lourmarin,
where Camus is buried.

From Avignon you drove, veracious,
quixotic, through fields of sunflowers,
cypresses in the distance,

vineyards up the rocky slopes, thinking
of the traces of Cro-Magnon in the hills
and the Roman ruins,

thinking of the cloister of Saint Trophime
and the castle of the Marquis de Sade,
thinking all civilization

had devolved on these olive groves, these
village museums, these vistas of roofs,
of cliff and harbors,

these festivals of the lemon and the cinema,
these goatherds and croupiers and keepers
of stalls in the market.

Is this how you recall it? Aphroistic,
unyielding, you approached the place
Camus chose to live

because the sky was so immense. Fervent,
diagnostic, observing the chateau, the town
hall, the church spire

rising against the Luberon, you thought
how on such a morning the seven-day cyclists
aspired, intending

coloraturas, democrats and entrepreneurs,
how in the cafes, the villas, evolved persons
were seizing the world.

And this is what happened? At the graveside,
agnostic, replete, you admired the simplicity,
the grace of the stones,

avowing only the names of Camus and his wife,
in a welter of mausolea. It was like this?
From the lavender

beneath which he lies, insensate, infinitely,
eternally extinquished, the existential chill
arose. Just

what he had avouched from the age of twelve,
you murmured to France, he had now confirmed.
All effusion,

all postulation, all yearning, all anguish
and despair itself were abjectly futile.
Absurd. Absurd.

You remember it sometimes like this? Having
a brioche, acquisitive, amenable, you thought
of him, noneless,

exultant under the sun, the stars of Algeria,
rebellious, nonetheless, on a Parisian stage,
writing, writing

nonetheless in Oran, nonetheless in Cabris.
Scanning the papers, ambivalent, technocratic,
you imagined

in that famously vivid light, transient hands
planting chrysanthemums beside a doorway,
doomed spirits

on the yachts in Antibes, playing boules
in a square. Is that how it was? What
did you do then?