Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems Read online

  two or three seconds before the music began,

  you heard its first notes coming. No such ghost

  in the digital version, just the melody’s clarinets,

  the muted brass in counterpoint. What he said

  and what he did: did either ghost itself into being first,

  into place in his father’s mind? Did he know

  what he would say or do before he said or did it?

  It came into the world and could not be undone

  or unsaid, but was it unforgivable? Either from certainty

  or misery, in the end it does not matter. From Old

  Testament wrath or intolerable, petulant rage,

  it does not go away. One cannot make it not be,

  it was and it is. One can forget it with age

  and infirmity or take it to the grave unresolved.

  How fortunate for me, my father alive, and attached

  to this memory in a sidelong way to music.

  Last night’s moon was waning and invisible

  behind clouds, but still its light glowed

  through the bedroom window. No one ever said

  anything like that to me. No father ever loved

  a daughter more than my wife’s loved her.

  The original title of “Moonlight Serenade”

  was “Now I Lay Me Down to Weep,” and the opening line was

  “Weep for the moon, for the moon has no reason to glow now.”

  A flea-bitten symbol, a hackneyed metonymy for love,

  that moon, a lyric trope retooled for a happier slant,

  and thus made worthier in the end of victory, a word

  no longer part of the vernacular of war. Eventually

  the war ends, you bury your father. Eventually nothing

  he said matters. Shame rots, scar tissue isn’t visible

  on the psyche’s skin, you forget you tried to forgive,

  you feel free to talk about it or you don’t. Now

  a song goes round and round for good reasons

  or for none at all, and many songs are about love.

  Glenn Miller vanished in December 1944, somewhere

  over the English Channel. Some historians believe

  his plane was hit by unused incendiaries jettisoned

  from Royal Air Force bombers, his death,

  in other words, caused by the actions of his own.

  NOW HERE

  The current turns a shoaly lace of pebbles

  in the shallows. They rattle tick and tack

  and ring; they sing hosanna to the afterlife of sand.

  Sun off a smolt in the kingfisher’s beak

  is a jewel its wings can live by. Its eye’s black

  and wary before it’s gone. Runoff rubble

  holds a rib cage against a rock. The land

  contributes everything, leaves and beasts

  and mountains bit by bit. A tiny bird’s nest bobs

  in an eddy, a blue egg-shard like a scrap of sky

  on board. Polished cedar knuckle, a knob

  of pine root, an amputated limb, a stob.

  The sun in the west throws shadows east,

  and a single vaporous cloud’s going by.

  From there it can see Montana

  and beyond. An hour stacking river rock

  one cannot be held accountable for. Applause

  and kudos, clack the pebbles. The heron’s stalk,

  hunger’s Zen, the river’s long, liquid clock

  and oceanward snowmelt extravaganza.

  Then there’s elsewhere: everyone else also in its claws.

  SEEN FROM THE PORCH, A BEAR BY THE HOUSE

  A mail of mud

  from his den’s dried

  along his back and side,

  and he would,

  if he raised his snout,

  catch my scent,

  except he’s too intent,

  tearing the rotten wood out

  of an old pine stump,

  to notice anything

  but hunger’s gnawing

  and his own low grunts.

  The long night

  winter was makes me

  feel for him no envy

  whatsoever, and though I might

  have wished not to be

  so bothered by its snows

  and cold, its blows

  and drifts and difficulties,

  none of these now seems…

  well, unbearable, so to speak.

  Whatever he is, he isn’t weak,

  as the stump’s smithereens

  make clear, but famished.

  I hold the slingshot taut.

  He’s too close here and ought

  to find another stump to ravish.

  That’s my thinking, at least,

  though what right I possess

  to this land still is less

  than his need for a grubby feast.

  So instead I yell Hey,

  loud and bellowish as I can,

  and he leaps half a man

  high and runs away

  a little ways, then stops,

  turns to see, and rises

  to his hind legs, surmises

  I’m nothing much, adopts

  a casual pose, and sits.

  He licks a forepaw’s pad,

  so that the top of his head

  is what the half-inch hex nut

  slung by the slingshot

  pings off of with a thock.

  And he spins with the shock

  and odd distance of it

  from me—sorcery

  it must be—and rushes

  into the deeper bushes

  and oncoming greenery,

  then into the distances

  the mountain gives,

  where he lives

  in such circumstances

  as he must relearn

  and will have to be,

  again, even so hungry,

  able to discern.

  FIRST PERSON

  One lies on one’s back in the woods, savoring the sun,

  and for some reason one has opted

  for what Fowler calls the “false first person pronoun”—one,

  that is, over the other. One brushes an ant from one’s ear.

  One peers up into the breeze-swayed branches

  of a ponderosa pine, one among many

  one has arranged oneself under. Perhaps the wind,

  which is easy and warm, dislodged the ant

  one swept from one’s ear, meaning

  it had fallen many times its height to land there,

  in the whorl of the ear of one. In truth, one wishes

  for the tongue of a sylph instead of an ant. Even two sylphs,

  one thinks, though perhaps it is not sylphs one means—

  they being invisible spirits of the air—

  but rather the slender girls of one’s conjuring. (One conjures,

  one admits.) Thinking one dead, a deer approaches.

  One imagines being a deer, but then one rises

  to a seated position, so that the deer will startle

  and run. If only one could run as a deer does.

  If one were not so weary, one would that very deer chase

  a ways, beguiled by the wave of its white tail.

  But no, one is molten. One seems to have no bones.

  One shall not run, not now, nor even rise.

  Instead, one shall subside to one’s supine pose

  and by the sun through the needles of the trees be dappled.

  Though of course one should avoid the word dappled.

  One knows this. Yet something about the sun

  and the sway of the shadows makes one

  larcenous as well as slothful. And as one acknowledges

  one’s Hopkinsian trespass, one notes

  perhaps the same sort of finch spoken of

  in his poem and sees one’s borrowing as praise.

  Of the finch, that is, altho
ugh it dawns on one

  that this particular finch is an American goldfinch,

  and one decides one’s praise is for him instead, the poet.

  One feels literary and allusive then. It seems one’s time

  upon one’s back in the woods is not wasted after all.

  There is the squeegee-squeegee-squeegee-squeegee song

  of the goldfinch. One is delighted by the nineteen ees

  in the preceding line, not one of which has been written,

  since one is reclined under the trees

  with none of the usual writing implements. (One counts them

  in one’s head and upon one’s fingers instead.) One’s 1965

  Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Fowler’s Modern

  English Usage delights one also, though it is a quarter mile away

  and stamped with the name and address of a dead woman

  one knew once. One knew her and she died, and one is glad

  to have known her, for she was droll and brilliant,

  although one wishes one had known her when she was young.

  Once one was young but is no longer,

  though one still conjures as if one were—sylphs, women,

  the too-soon dead, the chaste and priestly poets of yore.

  Otherwise, one does not imagine one is certain of much.

  In fact, one is almost asleep, but then a hawk alights

  on the limb directly above, a rabbit in its talons.

  One’s breath is held. One perceives the soul

  of the rabbit does not abide. One dares not move,

  even though one’s face and white T-shirt

  will soon be dappled with the rabbit’s blood.

  One imagines. One thinks of the one one loves

  and knows that she will startle

  to see one’s bloody face and shirt.

  One will stand seemingly wounded and speak to her

  of wind and sun, the hawk and its prey, the finch and the deer,

  even Fowler (all things whose beauty is past change),

  and the one one loves will not understand at first

  when one insists that one must never be

  the last one

  to die.

  KONG

  The new porch light casts a much brighter glow

  and an immense, probably sixty-foot-long shadow

  of me out beyond the woodshed, where I’m bound.

  And everyone knows, having learned the mechanics

  of shadows in childhood, that with each step I take

  away from the light, the shadow grows even larger,

  though fainter and therefore less impressive.

  I like to watch the darkest version of myself stacking

  stove logs in the rack, each one the bulk

  of a steer, and adding them to a truck-sized black rectangle

  attached to the infinite darkness of the house.

  Or of its shadow, at least. And when I walk

  empty-handed back to the shed, I peer into that dark

  and see, thrown across the snow, a bright trapezoid of gold

  from the bedroom window, where your own shadow

  undresses for bed, much larger than in real life, it’s true,

  but still too small for one so titanic as I have become.

  Soon, however, I will return to the house, turn off

  the porch light, stuff three or four logs in the stove,

  and enter the bedroom then lit only by our two small

  bedside lamps, hardly casting shadows at all.

  He must have known the feeling, Jack Driscoll,

  first mate of the SS Venture, with whom Ann Darrow

  had fallen in love on the way to the island,

  before Kong, before his enormous, expressive eyes

  and his very black and gentle hands had held her

  a quarter mile in the air over Manhattan.

  It would never have left him, that feeling,

  for all the years of their lives together, as she peered,

  just like you do, into his sad, inadequate gaze.

  CARHOPS, WITH LARKIN

  1

  Those were the days of sleeker deliveries,

  blonde idealism, Marilyn in the moon.

  In the town I grew up in, some dozen

  burgeries featured them, wielding trays

  sometimes as teeteringly stacked

  as were their deliverers, whom the bosses knew

  would draw as many customers as the food—

  and no doubt they did—although looking back

  I loved the food too, the ground beasts

  and cheese, the abundantly salted fries,

  the tiny plastic bowls of coleslaw

  there beneath the lights, on trays where rested

  also the frosted, sweaty mugs of root beer.

  And if things were slow, an actual girl

  might linger for a minute and converse,

  banter, or tease, until over there

  some brighter car or handsomer, older guy

  pulled in. They carried at their waists

  dispensers and repositories of change

  that jingled when they went away.

  2

  They’re still around, here and there,

  though some are boys, like tonight’s,

  who calls me “sir,” a label itself archaic,

  all that sixty-year-old music in the air.

  Larkin’s sitting next to me, long-gone

  Philip, eyeing the girls and feeling bitter

  about the boy and wishing for a warm beer.

  “Mightn’t a chap just ask for that redheaded one?”

  he asks. And I confess it’s my fault.

  I should have picked a different slot.

  But then he sees, from his seat

  on the passenger side, a leggy brunette

  haul a burdened tray to the car next door

  and reaches out a pale, ghostly hand

  to pat her ass, and fails, then sighs. “I can’t stand

  being dead,” he says, trying to be here

  but being nowhere. Then he asks, “Have any luck

  with one of these in your day, then?”

  Now we’re talking. There were some, back when,

  who’d hop in back and fuck and fuck

  you up in turn. He winces at the allusion.

  Everything grows farther away:

  carhops, the moon, parents, night. It’s strange;

  the carhop turns and screams through my illusion.

  EARTHQUAKE LIGHT

  March 11, 2011

  Earlier tonight an owl nailed the insomniac white hen.

  She’d fluttered up onto a fence post to peer at the moonlight,

  to meditate in her usual way on the sadness of the world

  and perhaps the hundreds of vanished eggs of her long life here.

  I was watching from the porch and thinking she ought not to be

  where she was, and then she wasn’t, but taken up, a white hankie

  diminishing in the east, one the owl would not ever drop.

  Now an hour after, the new night wind spins up a leghorn ghost

  of her fallen feathers, under the moon and along the meadow grass.

  Corpse candle, friar’s lantern, will-o’-the-wisp chicken soul

  dragging its way toward me, that I might acknowledge her loss

  and her generosity, and wonder again about her long-standing

  inability to sleep on certain nights. There are sky lights

  beyond our understanding and dogs whose work it is to scent

  the cancer no instrument can see. On the nights she could not sleep,

  the hen Cassandra Blue perched herself with a clear view to the west

  and studied the sky, every two seconds canting her head a few degrees

  one way or the other. What she saw or if she saw it I cannot say,

  though it seemed that something, always, somewhere, was
about to go

  terribly wrong. Then again, it always is. Now there’s a swirl

  of wind in the meadow, spinning three or four final white feathers

  west to east across it, and there’s a coyote come foolishly out

  into the open, hypnotized by feather flicker, or scent, then seeing

  by moonlight the too-blue shimmer of my eyes, and running for its life.

  TIMEX

  Freeing a crossways stob of fractured pine, perhaps,

  the man who’d saved himself one trip down the ladder

  to the off switch and still another one back up,

  and who’d saved himself that same trip so often

  he was proud of the vertical miles unclimbed

  and undescended, and the sweat from them he had not sweated,

  but this time, by some slip or somehow-too-far stretch, he fell

  straight down the slick steel throat of the wood chipper

  headfirst, taking whatever had stopped it with him

  and vanishing in an instantaneous blat and a ghost

  of blood vapor, becoming, like that, a pile of human pulp

  in the half-full trailer of a chip truck scheduled in fifteen minutes

  for the mill. Or so it was theorized by company investigators

  and a man sent from the office of occupational safety,

  whose suggestion that an off switch might be installed

  at the top of the platform as well as the bottom

  was implemented, though not mentioned in the final report

  or in the newspaper. The one whose pages were made

  from pulp that might have, despite the long boil

  and bleaching process, contained some rendered human element

  as well, although the paper also went on at length to describe

  the company’s generous settlement, not required, given the cause

  was worker avoidance of corporate safety regulations.

  No word, however, on whose job it must have been

  to recover what could be of the body in the trailer.

  Supple bone shards, mostly, unidentifiable nodules

  of tissue, three swatches of scalp still haired. They were a man

  and a woman, two employees of the state department of health,

  one of whom also retrieved, with tweezers, and offered

  to the victim’s wife, the minute hand from his watch.

  PART TWO

  POSSIBLES

  DESCARTES

  September 2010

  The aggravation of reading philosophy

  to fall asleep is that you can only sleep

  while reading. Once you turn out the light,

  you’re awake again, swamped in conundrums