Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems Read online

  ANATOMY

  OF

  MELANCHOLY

  AND OTHER POEMS

  ALSO BY ROBERT WRIGLEY

  Beautiful Country

  Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems

  Lives of the Animals

  Reign of Snakes

  In the Bank of Beautiful Sins

  What My Father Believed

  Moon in a Mason Jar

  The Sinking of Clay City

  ANATOMY

  OF

  MELANCHOLY

  AND OTHER POEMS

  ROBERT WRIGLEY

  PENGUIN POETS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Penguin Books 2013

  Copyright © Robert Wrigley, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Pages 109–110 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Wrigley, Robert, 1951–

  [Poems. Selections]

  Anatomy of melancholy and other poems / Robert Wrigley.

  pages cm

  Poems.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59263-2

  I. Title.

  PS3573.R58A83 2013

  811’.54—dc23

  2012038722

  Designed by Ginger Legato

  The author would like to express his gratitude to the Bogliasco Foundation, for a residency in the spring of 2011, at the Liguria Study Center, in Bogliasco, Italy, where a number of these poems were written.

  for Robert Coker Johnson

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  IN THE WHORL OF THE EAR OF ONE

  Triage

  Bovinity

  Cenotaph

  Friendly Fire

  Now Here

  Seen from the Porch, a Bear by the House

  First Person

  Kong

  Carhops, with Larkin

  Earthquake Light

  Timex

  PART TWO

  POSSIBLES

  Descartes

  Dada Doodads

  For I Will Consider My Cat Lenore

  Soundings

  Nightingale Capability

  Careers

  Legend

  Mercury

  The History of Gods

  Babel

  Spring Is Here

  PART THREE

  DARK BLUE MOUTH

  Goldfinches

  Blackjack

  Delicious

  Sweet Magnet

  Ode to My Boots

  On a Series of Four Photographs

  Dream of the Tree

  Catechism

  Rush

  “American Archangel”

  The Art of Excavation

  PART FOUR

  PINIONED HEART IN THE HEAT OF IT

  Socialists

  In His Sadness

  Salvage

  “Ain’t No Use”

  Iris Nevis

  Stop and Listen

  Calendar

  The Scholar

  Anna Karenina

  Anatomy of Melancholy

  To Autumn

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  “This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, not errant, but fixed: and as it was long increasing, so, now being (pleasant or painful) grown to a habit, it will hardly be removed.”

  —Burton

  “Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality.”

  —Burton

  “If any man except against the matter or manner of treating of this my subject, and will demand a reason of it, I can allege more than one; I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.”

  —Burton

  “A nightingale dies for shame if another bird sings better.”

  —Burton

  “So be it, then. It isn’t all that bad.”

  —Szymborska

  PART ONE

  IN THE WHORL OF THE EAR OF ONE

  TRIAGE

  Scarred by a long-gone buck’s rubbing,

  shoved westward by his develveting grind,

  the aspen had always leaned, and I had thought

  many times I should stake it up, straighten it out,

  but I never did. Then last week’s several heavy

  feet of snow became rain, and under that weight it split

  at the buck’s scar and bent to the ground,

  and I was bereft. But in my regret I hauled

  through the snow a hundred feet of ropes,

  a come-along, a pair of steel pintle hooks,

  and a five-gallon bucket of hopeful arborist’s

  paraphernalia. I tied it off to a stouter tree,

  winched it upright again, braced it with a two-by-four

  plank notched and swaddled at the notched end

  in inner tube ribbons, then guyed it off to the fir

  that was the engine of its reascension.

  Afterward I plastered black tar around its wound,

  wound a bandage of grafting tape over the tar,

  and covered the tape in a green vinyl sleeve

  against the winter yet to come. And every day,

  in order to offer such apologies as I can,

  I visit it. Sometimes, like the other day, I sit with it,

  put an arm around it, and describe the motions

  of its leaves in spring and summer,

  and especially in its glorious fall:

  how its gold shimmers, and how sometimes

  a leaf will loose itself and fly the ten yards

  to the porch of my shack and settle on a chair,

  or in the cold October rains plaster itself

  to a window like a kiss. That day I also explained

  the next step in our treatment. How once

  it is leafed out and green again, I will,

  using the same rope that righted it, fasten

  that rope at the height of my knee, at the strong

  unbroken butt of it just below the buck’s black scar,

  and winch it a bit more upright yet, until,

  by high summer, as straight as nearly any tree

  around it, it will stand. Soon the seat of my pants

  was wet from the snow and I was shivering,

  but still I didn’t want to go. I stood

  and stroked the dressing around its wound

  and resolved to come back from my shack

  that afternoon, to read it a poem or two—

  not my own, certainly not this one, but maybe

  “The Wellfleet Whale” or “The Trees,”

  in which “their greenness is a kind of grief”—

  though I have not done so yet. “Begin afresh,”

  I think this afternoon. “Last year is dead.”

  Larkin, I think, would have thought me a fool;

  Kunitz, maybe not so much. Though I noticed,

  in the divot where I’d sat beside it, a puddle

  my own face regarded me fro
m. I was empty-handed

  and knew neither poem, the long nor the short,

  by heart. Only the end of the Kunitz:

  “Like us,” it goes, “disgraced and mortal,”

  from the puddle, said my face.

  BOVINITY

  The steer has found, among the mud

  and diminishing islands of snow,

  a cropped-off but less coagulate expanse

  where it can lie and sleep awhile.

  From where I watch, I can see

  the quiver of an ear, a hind hoof

  gently twitching, the ordinary mammalian

  evidence that it is dreaming. But of what?

  I wonder. Fields of tall grass forever?

  A hay crib Jesus dispensing infinite fodder?

  Or maybe not of food at all but the litheness

  of its cousins, the deer and the elk,

  those dreams that materialize each night,

  when it must merely doze in the darkness,

  vigilant, awaiting, once again, the light,

  so that it might, as it does now, dream.

  Though it may be in this way I diminish it.

  It may be the cowbird, just a moment ago

  having alighted on its broad neck, is Nyx,

  consort of Erebus; that it dreams the day

  is the night. Or perhaps the cowbird is no bird

  at all, but the dream, and the dream is flying.

  And what of me then? Even in its sleep

  it may be aware of the presence of the maker

  of fences, bringer of the gun, conjurer

  of the high-backed truck and the hunchbacked

  butcher, builder of the gut pile the ravens

  and magpies will celebrate, for as long

  as the furtive night dogs will allow, though now,

  in sun and full sleep, it fears not, as it lifts

  and pumps its enormous wings and soars

  over the vast brown and white body of the earth.

  CENOTAPH

  Never especially inclined mathematically, my father,

  days past his eightieth birthday, calculated the following:

  if the names of all the dead, military and civilian alike,

  of every nationality, from his war—the good one—

  were blasted into granite, as were those of only

  the American soldiers who had perished in the bad one, mine,

  the resulting monument would be almost a mile long

  and a hundred feet deep. Setting aside the engineering challenges,

  he believed the greater problem was the names. Sixty million,

  he ciphered, though I don’t know how. His imagined monument,

  a project no greater than the interstate highway system

  or the dams across the nation’s rivers, could take decades

  to erect. No more than Rushmore or Crazy Horse.

  And yet who would have envisioned such a task?

  I remember how, the night of the first moon landing,

  he stood in his backyard in the heart of the heart of the country,

  straining through binoculars to see what could not be seen

  but was. Now ten years past his monumental calculations,

  the only numeral that matters to him is 2. We are not sure why.

  Perhaps because my sister and I are two. As are he

  and our mother, her failing eyes and gentle hands. And therefore

  “two” is the answer to every problem the young neurologist poses,

  a physician not much older than my own children,

  none of whom ever lived through something called the draft.

  My father does not know what year we are in or the name

  of our current president. Even the names of his grandchildren

  are lost to him sometimes, and if we were to ask

  that name by which he calls himself, we fear that, too,

  may be gone. He does not know, and probably never did,

  the word cenotaph, though the memorial he once imagined

  would have been just that, an empty tomb.

  Father, let me estimate the dead for you:

  it has been and will be everyone. Let us understand

  that mountains are—like plains and swamps,

  like rivers and oceans—death and life factories, forges from which

  come numberless souls, residents on a spinning blue cenotaph

  that without us has no name nor need of one.

  These were the dead of a single war, these the dead

  of the others. And here are those who died, as we say, in peace,

  some whose lives have faded within them until they are

  only the names and numbers they had been known by.

  And here is where they were, beneath a cyclical moon,

  which bears through the universe some footprints and a flag.

  FRIENDLY FIRE

  Is it even possible not to dream,

  or not remember what one dreams of,

  all the while a loop of endless music

  going round and round in the mind? Last night,

  every time I woke, it was “Moonlight Serenade,”

  a song first recorded twelve years before

  my birth—two weeks before my father’s

  seventeenth birthday—then rereleased four years

  later, in 1943, the middle of his Navy stint,

  as a “V-Disc.” V for Victory, of course.

  All night long, the melody’s mild clarinets,

  muted trumpets in jazzy counterpoint.

  It did not come from nowhere, though,

  this Glenn Miller classic, a four/four fox-trot.

  I remember its red, white, and blue label,

  from the Special Services Division, Music

  Section of the War Department, a relic.

  For an hour last night, my wife and I lay in bed

  and spoke of our fathers. Hers, who’d said

  if she’d been among the protestors at Kent State

  she too would have deserved to be shot,

  and mine, who in a singular act of anger

  had broken a record I thought I loved.

  In what way is one shaped by such a thing?

  she wondered. Had anyone ever said to me

  anything like what her father said to her?

  And I told her no, although I thought of

  Fresh Cream, the album mine had broken.

  I’d been trying to learn the Clapton solo

  on “I Feel Free,” sitting with my guitar

  before the speaker. I’d gone away, forgetting

  the record there, and came back just in time to see it

  shatter against a wall. They’re both love songs.

  In his, the man sings to his beloved in the light

  of the moon; in mine, in the end, she is the sun.

  Now my father’s almost ninety. He wouldn’t remember

  having done such a thing, and I have no interest

  in reminding him. We were at war in 1967.

  He was just home from work. It is unclear

  which of us was more miserable in his life then.

  My mother promised she would buy me

  a new one. My father reclined in his chair

  to wait for dinner, before he dressed

  and left for his second job, selling cars.

  It is unclear if the money he made those nights

  was necessary, though I think his absence was.

  I did not think last night of his love for Glenn Miller.

  I was not aware as my wife and I drifted into sleep

  that “Moonlight Serenade” was loosed in my mind,

  though I recalled this morning it was there

  at each of my brief and sleepy awakenings.

  And as it was all night, so it has been all day.

  Clarinets and muted trumpets, managing

  to be both melancholy and Caucasianally cool.

  I reme
mber he closed his eyes and seemed asleep

  in his chair. I remember my mother’s promise

  and the single proviso she extracted from me:

  that I say not a word of it over dinner.

  And so I seethed and said nothing else either,

  which must have made it, from her point of view,

  among the most successful and pleasant

  of our dinners in those days. She had left

  Glenn Miller spinning, the changer arm up,

  so that the song played again and again,

  as it has in my mind for fifteen continuous hours now,

  wordless through that day’s stewed beef heart

  and mashed potatoes, and through my lunch today as well—

  some yogurt and fruit, a handful of nuts,

  for now I am sixty, and while it is unclear

  if I have any interest in reaching the age my father is,

  I go on as though it were perfectly clear.

  In 1967, he’d begun the long fall from faith,

  believing never in God but somehow

  in the nation, while I’d been spared any sense

  of the holiness of either. Imagine an hour passed,

  dinner eaten, my father having showered

  and put on a tie, “Moonlight Serenade” still

  and now eternally going. My mother tosses

  a dish towel over her shoulder, and they dance

  a few steps around the kitchen. I can see them

  from the living room where I sulk and glare.

  It must have been that day, in the midst

  of rage and woundedness and fruitless stewing,

  that his song became so deeply etched in my memory.

  A moment ago I called it up from a computer file—

  no vinyl, no tape, no disc at all, another victory

  for technology, like virtual memory or unmanned drones—

  and it unrolled from the speakers exactly

  as I’ve been hearing it for a whole night and half a day,

  its now primitive recorded nature preserved

  almost perfectly, but for the absence of the needle’s hiss.

  In those days you either paid no attention to it

  or else never dreamed it would go away.

  If you are old enough to remember records—

  forty-fives, seventy-eights, and thirty-three LPs—

  you might also remember the ghost that lived

  at the gleaming ungrooved lip of them, the way,