PETER DAVISON
Under the Roof of Memory
(III Memory ojjalle Davisoll)
1.
Pleas
Please help us keep your memory alive.
When I leaf through what's left of you, stacked up
into a formless pile of crumbling paper,
my hand turns pages , and occasions blur
until I stoop for a mishandled pill
and cannot straighten up. Or yawn. Then
a whiff of the heat lightning of desire
flickers at the fragrance of a caress
forty years old, a darkened room in Kansas.
Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
2. Celebratioll
You floated weightlessly above your body,
in utterances aerating anything
that crept within your reach. You loved releasing
the preposterous, always managing to fold it
into a phrase, as when you located
Star Wars
as taking place in "the Marseilles of the galax),-"
Dwindling through the waning days of life,
you wrote in your last letter, "Simplify,
simplify seems to be the method to deal
with the uncertainties of my health, as we
apply rational faculties to solve problems
we never really thought of as problems: who
carries the dirty laundry down to the machine
in the basement, and who carries it up."
Setting your house in order. Simplifying it
into a church as your body prepared to die.
