This next poem I read for my wife.
I keep writing these love poems to my wife
and they're rather explicit.
Her father keeps saying she should sue me.
But do I stop and does she mind?
This poem is called "This Room and Everything In It."
I should probably explain what's going on in this poem.
It might be self-evident, I don't know.
There's a mnemonic technique which is described extensively
in some old Latin text.
The purpose is for orators who need to remember a speech
or I don't know mathematicians who
need to remember an equation.
And what you do is you find a beautiful--
not beautiful necessary, but a striking setting, a room,
a house, and you walk through it, excuse me,
memorizing the architecture.
And after you have the architecture memorized, what
you do is you walk through the place again
with parts of the speech significantly or metaphorically
attached to certain parts of the building or the room.
And when you make your speech you
in your mind walk through the room
and supposedly parts of the architecture--
These things will spring out at you.
It seems really--
I don't know --double handling.
Instead of remembering the speech,
you got to remember the room and then the speech.
But this again, is about a failure of memory.
It's called "This Room and Everything In It."
"Lie still now, while I prepare for my future.
Certain hard days ahead when I'll
need what I know so clearly this moment.
I am making use of the one thing I
learned of all the things my father tried
to teach me, the art of memory.
I am letting this room and everything
in it stand for my ideas about love and its difficulties.
I'll let your love cries, those spacious notes of a moment
ago stand for distance.
Your scent, that scent of spice and a wound
let stand for mystery.
Your sunken belly is the daily cup of milk I drank as a boy
before morning prayer.
The sun on the face of the wall is God.
The face I can't see my soul and so on.
Each thing standing for a separate idea and those ideas
forming the constellation of my greater idea.
And one day when I need to tell myself
something intelligent about love, I'll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it.
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes, my extinction.
Now I've forgotten my idea.
The book on the windowsill ruffled by wind.
The even numbered pages are the past.
The odd numbered pages, the future.
The sun is God.
Your body is milk, useless, useless.
Your cries are song.
My body's not me.
No good, my idea has evaporated.
Your hair is time.
Your thighs are song.
It had something to do with death.
It had something to do with love."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.