Home > Poetry > Memory Unsettled
profile/thom-gunn.md
Published: Sun Apr 15 1990
Eva Lundsager, Were now like (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
Memory Unsettled

Your pain still hangs in air,
Sharp motes of it suspended;
The voice of your despair —
That also is not ended:

When near your death a friend
Asked you what he could do,
‘Remember me,’ you said.
We will remember you.

Once when you went to see
Another with a fever
In a like hospital bed,
With terrible hothouse cough
And terrible hothouse shiver
That soaked him and then dried him,
And you perceived that he
Had to be comforted,

You climbed in there beside him
And hugged him plain in view,
Though you were sick enough,
And had your own fears too.

See what's inside AGNI 29 and 30

The Selected Poems of Thom Gunn was published in 2009 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (updated 7/2010)

“An Interview with Thom Gunn” by David Gewanter appeared in AGNI 36.

Back to top