Reason loses every argument in Josephine Clare's untitled poem, and the speaker knows it from the first line. "If memory were only in the head" is an "if" that never reaches its "then." What follows is a list of what happens because memory is not only in the head: it lives in the body, which has its own stubborn, embarrassing logic. The poem is about desire for one particular person, and about how that desire survives every attempt to manage it.
The opening advice, "do not sleep more than once / with any one," sits inside a bracket that, in the text as given, is never closed. That can look like a loose end, but it suits the poem. The warning is too late, and the thought spills past its own boundaries, just as the speaker's attempts at self-control do. The tidy rule comes before the damage, and the rest of the poem shows what the rule failed to prevent.
Clare gives the body two personalities, both of them unreasonable. First it is "a stupid red neck." The pun is crude and funny: the neck flushes with anger, and the "fist / down on the table" and the shouted "get me that body now!" belong to a bully who "sees red." Then the image shifts to "a crabby baby / that wants / wants with a vengeance." The line break on the repeated "wants" makes the craving stall and then burst out. The baby confuses a person with food ("the baby thinks that body / is the bottle"), and when it doesn't get what it wants it blackmails. It goes "on a fast" and announces, in a small lowercase voice, "i die on you / you'll be sorry." The speaker, the grown-up in charge, is both the parent and the target of the tantrum.
The word "body" carries most of the poem's meaning. It appears again and again, shifting between flesh and person, and the small words in front of it do the real work. "This body" is whoever is available now. "That body" is the one the baby wants, "that body from back there." When the speaker tries to cheat ("you give the body a body / you give it some fine body"), the substitution fails. The body "repulses it," because it can tell the difference. The phrase "back there" is the only place the poem admits time and memory directly. The past is not stored as an idea. It is stored as appetite, and appetite cannot be fooled.
The sound of the poem backs this up. There is no rhyme and little punctuation, only a few dashes, a colon and one exclamation. Short, unpunctuated lines tumble into one another with the pace of a tantrum. The plosive b's of "bang," "baby," "bottle," "body," "begging" and "bottle" keep thumping through the middle section, a sound like fists and rattles. Even the geography is comic: "a thousand miles" between you and that body makes no difference, because the begging does not stop.
The ending is the poem's best stroke. The lines shorten as the body "has tantrums / almost suffocates / gasps," and the poem seems to be running out of air along with it. Then comes the first capital letter in the poem, in "It's embarrassing." Everything before it is lowercase, as if the body and the speaker's inner voice were talking without punctuation or politeness. The capital brings back the social self, the one who has to face other people, and what it says is flat and deflating. After all the shouting, shame is the only comment left, and the poem ends without a full stop, so even that judgment is left hanging.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about being humiliated by one's own wants. It does not romanticise longing or turn it into grand language. It treats it as something undignified, comic and real. By the end, the opening "if" has been answered by implication: memory is not only in the head, and the head is the last to find out.