Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems
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
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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,