(Week Two) Improvisation #2 of The Elegy

of W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats” 

Riff off of the lines, "What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day." 

The nurse draws the sheet delicately over
your face. I fear its burden on my own, 
as night might cower at the stiffness 
of a rising sun. I walk toward the body
once particular with a crisp-line 
of poetry, the body that said if each word 
refused to fold underneath my tongue
and taste naked, somehow, I knew nothing
about the poem. Outside a couple college 
students play bingo with a table of undead. 
One lifts his glass of juice, toasts this life
to good health. And I think what a waste-- 
everyone is always so busy dying. From inside
my bag I recover the Contemporaries, those 
whose obsession was to live in between 
worlds--as I read to you, the words break
unevenly and symmetrically from my mouth.