'More or Less Anybody’s Thoughts'

Someone has posted a photograph of the marker above L.E. Sissman’s grave and accompanied it with a reading of several Sissman poems. The stone resembles an early American headstone, with a rising or setting sun at the top – tasteful, elegantly plain, as Sissman no doubt would have wanted. On the stone are inscribed these unexpected lines: “. . . undeterred by pity, / I walk out briskly to / infect my city.” They are taken from the third section, “Gare du Midi,” of “Scattered Returns: Three Derivative Poems” (Scattered Returns, 1969). The poem alludes to Auden’s “Gare du Midi” (Another Time, 1940). Like Auden’s poem, Sissman’s use of the lines as his epitaph (assuming they were his choice) is ultimately mysterious. He died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, hardly an infectious disease, and his poetry is rich in pity for others. I’m pleased to see the grave of a favorite poet, but also baffled – hardly a unique response to a cemetery visit -- though I’m reminded of Philip Roth’s thoughts in Patrimony (1991), prompted by a visit to his mother’s grave:

“I find that while visiting a grave one has thoughts that are more or less anybody’s thoughts and, leaving aside the matter of eloquence, don’t differ much from Hamlet’s contemplating the skull of Yorick. There seems little to be thought or said that isn’t a variant of ‘he hath borne me on his back a thousand times.’ At a cemetery you are generally reminded of just how narrow and banal your thinking is on this subject.”

A shameful admission for a writer. We fancy ourselves eloquent on every occasion, reliably articulate even in the face of death. We’re not. How humbling to defer to a writer who lived half a millennium ago. Our thoughts and emotions are not our own, but the dead must be remembered, whether or not our words are worthy of them. A visit to Paris means a visit to the graves of Baudelaire, Proust and Beckett.