Under the Roof of Memory
(In Memory of Jane Davison)
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. Celebration
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 galaxy."
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.
3. Remonstrance
Why can't you take your rest? You have been dead
so long that every cell of you has entered
my helplessly surviving body, leaching down
beneath the landscape to our children,
to the dear actuality of my second wife.
You could, like her first husband, live with us
as an invisible, cherished, and welcome presence.
You would be past sixty now. You would have stiffened,
whitened, would feel aches of your own,
and shuffle, smiling at your own decline
and other such absurdities: my own.
4. Critique
Is it worth much, this sedulous retelling
of the careworn beads of the body? Why must I
catalogue its youthful urges, its middle-aged
infelicities, its eldering need to finger
its entrances, dark witnesses to history?
Get shut of the obsessive self-regard
of the child, that temperature chart more passionate
in the terms of description than in the thing described!
What price forgetfulness? What price peace?
5. Envoi
Late in my life, I dream of us together,
clothed in the house whose peaked, protective roof
floats without burden over spacious rooms,
commodious, airy, bright as a church. Its walls
and roof, pulled out of touch by the intervention of time,
hold up a screen for love, a sleight of words.
We longed to keep a ravenous world at bay
by gazing down its glare and speaking well.
Copyright Credit: Peter Davison, "Under the Roof of Memory" from The Poems of Peter Davison, 1957-1995. Copyright © 1995 by Peter Davison. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.