Lugubrious Stars of the Tomb

The pre-revolutionary New Wave nuns

in La Religieuse’s worse first convent, locked up

for everything, slip little scribbled paper slips

into a small wooden box at mass, one by one

in a soft stone room

where the cinematography’s saturation

and a creamy blue nimbus

emanating from every surface

make the movie theater’s patrons’ faces

look like crickets twitching in a nebula,

an orchestra drowning in its pit. “That looks fun,”

whispered one to the left of me,

“do you think they’re voting?” You know

some artful gravity beyond the screen

might just be. Anna Karina rats on them

and gets out in the end. But it’s not the end.

If you think this damp little room you live in

is all that’s holding you

you’re right. Every second is a door

bolted shut. You can hear your music

behind a few, but only one or two will open.

Anna’s second convent seems

better at first—carnations

who knew she’d missed them all winter, chords

to a popular ballad tapped out in code

and sung in a strained, louche unison

replacing those lonesome hymns

in praise of nothing but reward—

but then the final shot crosses

all of it out. The mess they leave her in

feels pretty uncalled for, to say the least.

There’s no third convent,

no exit theme, and when the lights go up

you’re not as glad to have witnessed it

as to see the one who was talking trash,

a sentence drumming in your throat.