Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems Read online

  and that elaborate subordinating syntax

  with which the fact of your own existence

  is made debatable. I read Descartes,

  therefore I am sleepy. I sleep not,

  therefore I think and am desperate not to.

  As for the moon, unless my senses deceive me,

  it is full, and though the pull of it provides for the tides,

  there’s no surf thrash here to lull me asleep. Instead,

  I keep thinking of Francine, Descartes’s daughter,

  who died at five of scarlet fever.

  The brightness of the moon allows me

  to study the blood in my eyelids,

  which I am otherwise uncertain is truly there.

  Not even thinking about it proves it,

  although, if Descartes was correct, thinking suggests

  that I am, as he must have been,

  susceptible to what is called heartbreak,

  a metaphorical rendering of grief.

  It would have kept him awake too,

  370 years ago this month.

  After her passing, it took him two years

  to demonstrate, at last, the immortality

  of the human soul, and still she was gone,

  and still I cannot sleep for thinking.

  The impossible to be borne is withstood,

  and philosophy is nothing

  the metaphorical heart cannot annihilate.

  Little about the moon has changed

  since Descartes would have looked upon it and thought,

  though he must have also felt how little his thinking mattered

  in the end, proving, as it did, nothing but that she had been,

  and was, though he could not stop thinking of her, no more.

  DADA DOODADS

  The house the widow sold us

  contained, she said, an attic full of treasure

  or trash, and it would be our adventure,

  my wife’s and mine, to discover which.

  And what it was, was a museum, a gallery,

  or at the very least a monument

  to the organizational skills of her late husband,

  a veteran of World War I, dead many years.

  Everything boxed, stacked, and labeled,

  and every label gospel. “Two ’37 Ford

  hubcaps, one dented,” and inside,

  just that. “Shells from the beach, Atlantic,”

  another from the Pacific. Old dishes,

  so noted. A box of paper bags, another

  of boxes. A box of “brown work pants,

  never worn.” Another at the bottom

  of a tall stack, “Assorted screws,” weighed

  fifty pounds. And I, being less afraid

  of spiders than my wife, was appointed auditor,

  and found only accuracy and doodads:

  there was a box in which I discovered—

  I counted them—“fifty-four things

  of no apparent use,” exactly as he’d said,

  and I worked my way from the attic’s far end

  to the one nearest the trapdoor back down

  into the bedroom closet, stretching out

  to take up from the decades’ accumulated dust

  the final container of more than a hundred

  I investigated there. In his usual

  block-print letters, the following:

  “Empty box”—which a first shake

  seemed to confirm as true, but still

  I looked inside to be sure. And may I say

  how glad I was then, that by some dumb luck

  I had begun my accounting,

  as he must have wished someone to,

  at that far, other end. And may

  I also say how much my respect for him,

  or her, as well as my compassion—

  for her, for him, for all the world—

  was increased at just that moment,

  since this last box contained only,

  in the same black marker, scrawled diagonally

  across the bottom, the word nothing.

  FOR I WILL CONSIDER MY CAT LENORE

  For she has, in this her twelfth year of hunting,

  lost some weight in the summer, despite

  the daily, even hourly, slaughter of everything

  smaller than she and unable to escape her.

  For she had for some time, unbeknownst to me,

  relieved herself on my favorite dress shoes,

  making them foul and fit only for the fire.

  For though she be named after the place

  she was born, as long as such legions as she requires

  might be dispatched and often devoured

  in whole or part, she is happy to be here

  or there, it hardly matters otherwise.

  For she does not like me, and I know not why,

  and offer her each morning a tablespoon of cream,

  which she will deign to lap a bit, then abandon

  to the dog. For there is her purr

  in the lap of my daughter, whose cat she was,

  and there is her purr in the laps of my sons

  and my friends, though her purr

  in the lap of he who offers her cream

  whirreth never. For the practical worth of her depredations

  is the ratio by which those preyed upon

  enter not the house. For the house is in the woods

  and the woods are also full of those whose depredations

  upon her are as avidly sought as hers upon her prey.

  For she is luckier than her mother

  and brother, gotten by owl, coyotes, or eagle,

  or perhaps even one of those of the same order as she:

  bobcat, lion, or lynx. For she is gray

  and invisible, it seems. For she cougheth up

  elaborate balls of her own fur upon the carpet

  for me. For I have labored to love her

  and have accomplished by such labors

  an understanding, at least, since I have watched her

  at the hunt and been inspired by the single-mindedness

  and excellence of her predatory disposition.

  For I have also wondered what manner of attentiveness

  of my own I might have brought to bear

  upon anything that could equal hers,

  unless it be praise. For the sun and the moon,

  for the plenitude of mice, and for the still-beautiful

  back of the hummingbird she has left in the ashtray,

  next to the chair on the porch of my shack.

  For it is a calliope hummingbird,

  smaller than my little finger, and its purple cowl,

  in the time I have attended to this consideration

  of its killer, has, without my notice, faded,

  and Lenore herself has uncoiled from the chair

  where she had slept for more than an hour,

  and walked back into the woods,

  to which I will toss

  the hummingbird’s almost weightless body,

  which she left me, so that I might feel

  exactly the way I do right now.

  SOUNDINGS

  The birdhouse made from a gourd is wired

  to a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast post

  of the shack. Two holes at the top—near where the stem was,

  for a thong of leather to hang it by, which broke long ago—

  are now the finger holes of the mournful wind instrument it’s become.

  The broad, round bowl of it makes a sort of birdly

  basso profundo that pearls through the steel, into the post,

  into the floor joists and walls, in two notes: a slightly sharp D

  and an equally sharp F, says the guitar tuner,

  which explains why all my thinking these days

  is in B-flat, a difficult key for all but the clarinet

  and this sudden covey of nut
hatches, whose collective woe

  makes it a minor chord I am in the middle of.

  Nothing to do but hoist such silks as the luff

  of limbs and needles suggests, and sail on,

  the barely-escaped-from-the-cat chipmunk chattering

  like a gull, and the mountain’s last drift of snow

  resembling the back of a sounding whale. Hear the thrum of the rigging,

  Daggoo? Hear its profoundest woo, its sensible gobbledy-goo

  and doo-wop, the boo-hoos of the spheres, by vectors and veers,

  by tacks and refractal jabberings, taking us deeper into the weirdness

  of the ghost sea those prairie hills were the bottom of once,

  this nowhere we shall not be returning from.

  Draw the lines! Assume the crow’s nest, Pip. This ship

  sails on music and wind, and away with birds.

  NIGHTINGALE CAPABILITY

  Italy, May 2011

  We’ve been in Bogliasco a week

  before we understand the bird that’s wakened us

  each miserably early morning is a nightingale.

  I am pleased by this, just as I was years ago,

  when I had my picture taken in Rome,

  kneeling next to the gravestone of John Keats.

  Every time I look at that picture, I think, There I am, kneeling

  next to the gravestone of John Keats. And this week,

  wakened every dark morning before four, I think,

  I’m hearing the same kind of bird Keats wrote of, at Hampstead,

  in one of the great odes of 1819, and it makes me a little sad

  to confess that of them all I love the nightingale ode least.

  Even the bird’s singing—fulsome and musical,

  especially in the still-dark Ligurian morning—

  does not appeal to me as it did to Keats. At this deep blue

  and aubadial hour, it’s too loud. And too much.

  But then, so is the fact that on Bartleby.com,

  right there on my screen next to Keats’s poem,

  is Alexia. She’s beautiful and pouty, barely dressed,

  “in a relationship,” it says in Italian, but who

  “ha insoddisfatti desideri.” She has “unsatisfied desires,”

  in other words. “Aiutala!” it implores. Help her! Too much, yes,

  but interesting: Keats, a nightingale, unsatisfied desires,

  the longing for perfection, and Alexia. Here she is again,

  this time alongside “To Autumn,” a poem I prefer,

  although now I’m puzzled by both her abundance

  and her ubiquity, since she’s next to the “Grecian Urn”

  and “Melancholy” too. She’s not by the “Ode to Psyche,”

  which is strange, since the first words of that one are

  “O Goddess!” and clearly that’s what Alexia’s meant to appear

  to anyone who comes upon her here. (She’s thirty-four, it says,

  almost a decade older than Keats ever was.)

  For some reason Bartleby prefers not to offer “Indolence” at all;

  it’s nowhere on the site, though Keats himself described its subject

  as “the only happiness…the body overpowering the Mind,”

  something Alexia could be said to personify: a bold lover

  one can never kiss. As for the figures on the urn, it’s true

  they will live in supple youth and mad pursuit

  as long as does the urn, and their desires will

  in all that time go unsatisfied: boughs that cannot shed

  their leaves, the piper who, unwearied, pipes new songs forever,

  the figures forever warm and still to be enjoyed, forever

  panting, forever young. Some believe Keats died a virgin.

  Others think his most worldly friend, Brown,

  surely took him to a brothel once. Meanwhile, here in the dark

  Italian morning, I left the woman I love in bed a floor below

  in order to investigate a bird whose song I never heard

  except in words. I made my way to where, thousands of miles

  from home and all my books, I could examine

  how such a thing might matter to me. And when I sought

  Keats’s poems electronically, there was Alexia,

  and since then I have thought more of her than of Keats,

  or my beloved, or the nightingale still singing outside.

  Even leaning dangerously far out the studio window,

  I can’t see it. And back on the computer screen, Alexia—

  despite the almost two-centuries-old, deathless lines

  to her right—insists that it is she who should have my attention,

  even as the nightingale sings on. Of love,

  Keats said, “It is my religion. I could die for it.”

  He also said, “I would sooner fail than not be among

  the greatest,” and then he died, believing himself a failure.

  If I abandon this task soon and return to our room,

  I’ll find my lover in bed, sleep-warm and soft. But still,

  there remains something I have not said and believed I could.

  I thought it had to do with poetry, but it seems I was wrong.

  Keats’s desire was to make something beautiful and true,

  to feel the satisfaction not only of knowing he’d done so,

  but to believe that the world would see it and acknowledge it too.

  And still, that acknowledgment came too late to do him any good.

  One more, and among the least, in the endless human plague

  of unsatisfied desires. And what I might have said, or might yet,

  has little to do with the viewless wings of Poesy,

  and more to do with the way the dull brain perplexes and retards

  the body’s progress toward love. Imagine writing the line,

  “More happy love! more happy, happy love!” What does it mean

  that I can’t? Her lack of satisfaction makes Alexia look miserable

  in an ever-so-ravishable way, but if I clicked on “Aiutala,”

  I would be no closer to her than I am to Keats.

  Therefore, the villa’s twenty-four stone stairs

  back down to the second floor fly by as swift as in a dream,

  and when I’m back in my bed and my lover’s arms again,

  it is my mind that reawakens and overpowers, for a while at least,

  my body, and I speak: nothing of Alexia, Keats, the nightingale, or the odes;

  nothing of how tender the night has been, or the least sickness for home;

  only remembrance, softly: that she recall the night of the day

  she took my picture as I knelt by the grave of a Young English Poet.

  Weary from hours walking the ancient streets of Rome,

  we lay on a rooftop terrace no more than a hundred yards

  from the room he died in. In the distance, St. Peter’s dome

  glowed silver-blue. Remember? We were there all night,

  and all night, gulls from the Tiber passed overhead, squawking.

  No one would ever describe their calls as soulful or melodious,

  but that night, I say, they were beautiful, and she is satisfied.

  CAREERS

  Not a bonehead, though yes, we called

  the class she was enrolled in that—those

  of us who taught such classes, believing

  that mucking among the illiterates was beneath us.

  We were meant for finer things: the joys

  of allusion and figure, the lushness that is literature.

  And yet, for this assignment, the dreaded process

  paper, for which I had encouraged them

  to consider nothing too mundane or daily,

  she had written—in contrast to her dreary

  colleagues, the changers of oil and bakers of cookies—

  a pape
r that, step-by-step, described

  in impressive and vastly appealing detail

  her morning shower. She was not guileless either.

  She knew I could not—as I confronted

  each paragraph’s sequential topic sentence—

  not imagine her there: first her hair, then her face,

  then her body from her arms and shoulders to her waist,

  and from her feet back up to what she called—

  most fetchingly—her “possibles,” which

  by such mention she must have known those too

  I could not possibly help but imagine. She finished

  by shaving her underarms and her legs,

  wrapping a towel around her, and combing out her hair.

  O, let us learn, I thought to myself that day, humility

  and all the humble pitfalls and perils of language

  and instruction. If there were a career in bathing

  and reporting the processes thereof, she was home free.

  And there were jobs, I did not doubt, that her paper,

  offered as a letter of application, might well land her,

  if only she sat across the desk from someone

  not at all like me and beamed the way she did,

  mostly in pride. I struck three semicolons,

  one of them used correctly but pointlessly.

  She leaned in very close; she was not pleased

  with her A-minus, but honestly thrilled.

  I realized I was hardly older than she was,

  but at the weekly meeting with my own colleagues

  I did not speak of her at all, nor of the ballplayer

  who’d threatened to break my nose if he did not pass,

  nor of the tree-crushed, almost quadriplegic former logger

  whose papers were transcribed by an amanuensis

  of nearly intolerable linguistic ignorance. This would be

  my life for some years. It was a way to live.

  The girl aimed to be a nurse and marry a doctor.

  The ballplayer went to the bigs and became

  a millionaire. The hired scribe left the logger

  in his motor-driven wheelchair on a dock by the river,

  to fish, and somehow the motor joystick was nudged

  just enough so that he tumbled in and drowned.

  The scribe, from the office of occupational rehabilitation,

  in an act supremely needless and disarming,

  brought the logger’s final paper to me

  and wept in my office like a baby.

  LEGEND

  It is the legend, regarding the hole at the Big Eddy

  of the Clearwater River, that it be not bottomless