LEST WE FORGET

Bruise sage, rosemary and balm
in the hollow of your palm;
infuse lustily and drink:
you'll remember now and think.

Men in bowlers and medals
come stiffly to attention.
The carer tugs at William's sleeve.
'Those medals are not yours, you know:
leave them alone. Look, the cenotaph,
remember?' William remembers nothing:
his head is an empty tomb.

Who are you?
What is that hand that floats
like five articulated male members
reaching for my. . .
reaching for. . .
reach. . . ?
Where are we? -
were we? -
will we be?

What are these booming tubes? -
that blooming hat?-
the masted sheets?
This is a place that glows with -
glows with something:
cousin? country? cutter?
or what the pig meant?

Here behind William's eyes
a soup of neuritic plaque
is simmering in a cranial pan.
You want the recipe? -
Degenerative nerve terminals
whisked lightly into froth
so thick it clogs the mind;
now saute in reactive glial cells
with a pinch of amyloid
and knead into neurofibrillary tangle.

So here we are -
Where? -
Here.
Prepare the star,
bare
fear.

Thought congeals
in the deep-freeze of my mind
like an LP slowed
by a vandalistic thumb.
Who are you?
What relation,
generation?
Who are you, mister? -
brother or sister?
I remember
a member
banded with a simple wedding ring.

He's forty-five today,
his skin as clear as silk;
his mind's a lump of clay
as thin as half-skimmed milk.

The poppy in his lapel
was put there by a nurse.
What it is he cannot tell
and if he could he'd curse.

Suddenly a synapse sparks
and I recall
a memory of memory
buried beneath shrapnel and mud,
dead genes recalling
someone else's past.

Where was I then?
where underneath the crumbling loam
of earth and blood?
I was a twinkle
in Grandfather's eye.

The eleventh of the
what?
The eleventh.
For a moment the sniper's hand
strays from the trigger
to the itchy skin between his fingers.

Eleven in heaven,
XI in the sun?
Eleventh
of eleventh
of El Alamein?

In the two-minute silence we remember
the Sacrifice or unpaid bills,
Somme harvest time or war of wills.
In each day's silence
of fourteen hundred and forty minutes
William remembers nothing but the pa
of all efforts to recall.

Bruise sage, rosemary and balm
in the hollow of your palm;
infuse lustily and drink:
you'll remember now and think.