Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems Read online

  but a might-as-well-be warren of shelves, caves,

  and chambers, lost and cast-off sand and silt makings

  so churned by the river’s hydraulics that every depth-gauge

  sinker has spun from it a wasted mile or two

  of horizontal measurement that is never returned.

  Which is why we have had to imagine,

  these forty and more years after the incident, the three

  witnesses now gone, how carefully

  the doctor’s wife must have driven the Cadillac down

  the boat ramp and into the water, and how the car

  strangely floated, turning slowly, sunk to the roofline,

  until it vanished at what must have been the very mouth

  of the myth of bottomlessness itself: one Coupe de Ville

  Cadillac, 1963, yellow, windows according to witnesses

  rolled up tight, and holding the driver, presumed to be

  a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three children,

  presumed also to have been inside. Such is the power

  of plain police reportage, and also of the grappling hooks

  that over the next week brought to the surface

  twelve sunken logs and the carcass of a drowned moose,

  before the search was abandoned and a service performed

  on the beach there. Here is a black-and-white picture

  of several hundred mourners. Late spring. The beach is pale sand,

  and white shoes dangle from the fingers of several of the women.

  From this angle, the highway roadbed looking down,

  the river turns above the eddy like water in a drain.

  Go down there now, in the turn of it, and see

  the Cadillac descend among the many oscillating logs

  untouched, scraping not the least outcropping and coming

  at last to rest on an only slightly slanted shelf,

  a right rear wheel over the edge and slowing

  to a stop. By now the rubber window gaskets

  will have disintegrated, and sometimes a sturgeon

  longer than the Coupe de Ville itself

  will slide its soft sucker mouth along a glassy seam

  for no reason but the dim reminder of a soup

  it sipped there once. Such is the power of memory,

  which this is not. Not of the doctor’s yellow Cadillac, nor

  of his beautiful wife behind the wheel and headed out of town.

  She looked your way, but you did not see her see you at all.

  MERCURY

  Some thug or other was always vanishing.

  East St. Louis, my father said. He always said that.

  City of my birth. The new highway made it possible

  to pass the place by, ill-lit, seemingly unpeopled.

  He drove fast. The windows were down.

  He’d let me extend the blade of my hand

  into the wind of our going, and we were passing

  a large trailer-truck loaded with crushed,

  compacted cars—a recognizable Chevrolet emblem

  on one, and from another, a slip of fabric,

  headliner or upholstery, black and pointed

  at its end, resembling, I remember, a necktie.

  THE HISTORY OF GODS

  When a lesser species rises among them

  to consume the sun immemorially theirs,

  redwoods will sometimes let go a great limb

  and crush the interloper where it stands,

  implying intent and therefore what we know

  as consciousness. It is theorized they may be able,

  via their massive and elaborate root systems,

  to command the groundwater itself, for the benefit

  only of their kind—a government and fealty of trees.

  Though perhaps what seems intentional

  is simply part of the balance they exemplify,

  the fallen limb afflicted by a disruption

  in the nutrient flow precisely above where a hemlock

  or pine has sprung forth, suggesting the decision

  is no decision at all but simply cause and effect,

  silvicultural machinery, as though it were not the mind

  of a god but a body, reflexive to stimulus and wound,

  actions neither revenge nor damnation nor self-preservation.

  Although the darkness they rise from is their own creation,

  and high in their canopies, lichens not found below,

  delicate as fog, and birds that might as well be angels.

  BABEL

  The language he speaks and writes is spoken

  and written by no one but him, which solves,

  for him at least, the problem of audience.

  Unless somehow, against the odds, he believes

  there is someone to whom his alphabet speaks,

  and his words—if they are words and not notes

  of some other sort of singing, a system of clicks

  and impossible vowels, the strange habitats

  in which his bent and prickly syllables live.

  The patience with which he clears his throat

  and nods to us and begins, mild and tentative

  at first, to read, or sing, or ceremonially recite

  the epic of his people or the story of his God

  or the description of his lost beloved’s body,

  moves us so each time, we concentrate and nod

  but understand nothing at all of what he

  has said. When he’s finished, he looks at us

  expectantly, and we, in our own inadequate tongues,

  and often gesticulating wildly, discuss

  the majesty of his accomplishment, which no one

  fathoms any part of, least of all our praise,

  if that’s what it is, since we too are the last

  or perhaps the only ones ever to raise

  into the air such utterances—from the past

  or the future or from this very moment in time,

  when no one knows what anyone means to say or tell,

  not even at night, when we seem to pray, then recline

  on our bunks, each in his own terrible, familiar cell,

  with the toilet and the night-light, with the reams

  of paper, filled and yet to be, that surround us,

  and he goes on speaking through our dreams,

  where everything, making sense, astounds us.

  SPRING IS HERE

  The umbrellas misfired, the rain broke down,

  all the seed-white dandelions were bludgeoned

  to a fluffy paste. The bell tower ratcheted

  up its terrible black birds. Negotiations

  broke out between thunder and cell phones

  despite the enormous vee of geese going by.

  Someone whispered the secret of the match

  to a cigarette, and hail commenced

  machine-gunning a delicate wing of smoke.

  Cruel world for bathing beauties, though. The clatter

  of flip-flops rose like an ovation for the nation

  of May, and the Goth boy in his black greatcoat

  pale as the Jesus over Rio and similarly stanced,

  having raised his arms and brought to the air

  not only the wail of the noon whistle

  but also the howl of a hound dog leashed to a hydrant,

  as though it, in the midst of such majesty,

  in the last week of classes, were his wolf.

  PART THREE

  DARK BLUE MOUTH

  GOLDFINCHES

  He could not, he insisted, take his eyes

  from the pistol’s muzzle, calculating

  as he watched it, from the way it quivered—

  and cocked, as it was, a single action,

  it seemed—how easily that quivering

  could cause it, without the man’s intending,

  to discharge, as we say, and thinking too,


  given its angle, what part of him would,

  in that event, be thus sundered and torn.

  Although, this was after the fact, later,

  as he explained to the two policemen,

  how he kept his left hand in front of him,

  as though he might catch the slug, or block it,

  even as he reached slowly behind him

  and produced, with thumb and index finger,

  the wallet he dropped mildly between them

  and stepped back from as the mugger stepped forward

  and bent to retrieve it.

  Only then

  did he see not the pistol, but the tattoo

  of the birds on the other’s left forearm.

  Sundered and torn, he’d said. Those were his words,

  though the policeman writing it all down

  did not write it all down that way, except

  for the tattoo, its three colorful birds

  and the leafy gray branch they perched upon.

  Birds, he’d said, American goldfinches,

  of the sort that winter in the canyons

  east and south of the city, and which sing,

  canary-like, ti-dee-di-di, sweetly,

  and gather in flocks on winter mornings,

  bobbing on the limbs of leafless birches,

  to feed on the last dry catkins and fly

  all at once, as one, with a single mind,

  or none, startled by nothing, or by some move

  nothing but one or all the birds could see.

  Almost exactly life-size, and well done,

  artistically, even, in the dim lights

  of that backstreet he’d walked a thousand times.

  Nicely rendered songbirds, he’d said, which were

  how it was the culprit would be, as we say,

  so easily apprehended, strung out,

  asleep in an aging junker Plymouth

  in the city’s best park, the pistol snugged,

  the newspaper reported, “like a teddy bear,

  directly under the suspect’s chin,

  the victim’s wallet still in his pocket.”

  It also spoke of the tattoo only

  in the most general terms, as that which,

  being the classic identifying mark,

  along with the wallet, would convict him.

  Still, thereafter, he, the victim, always

  described the goldfinches in great detail,

  feeling, as he’d come to, that it was they

  who might well have saved him, remembering

  how slowly he’d moved, so as not to startle

  the birds outside his window, and not

  to have to keep seeing, neither in memory

  nor dream, the dark blue mouth of the pistol.

  BLACKJACK

  In fact, it’s a beautiful thing: expertly made,

  the egg of lead in the business end

  and the flexible leather braid

  leading to a bulb for the hand

  and the loop for the jacker’s wrist,

  kinetic energy far superior to a fist’s.

  It is also perfect for holding a book

  open to a certain page or passage.

  How it feels about such work,

  we cannot know but can imagine,

  being men and wondering, after all—

  the thud and crumple, the fall.

  In the palm of my left hand, I slap it; then

  he, in his right, my left-handed, bookish friend.

  DELICIOUS

  He loves how cold she always is. Even sandwiched

  in their matched, fully-zipped-together sleeping bags,

  she presses herself to his back, chilled tomato to the ham of him.

  It’s August, but the river runs an arm’s length below them,

  runs her height from them southwest, and it is cold, colder

  than she is, though here is where she loves to sleep,

  inside the almost-kiss of it, the river’s endless consumption

  of stones, its long nightly respirations risen into veils,

  into vapor tatters a morning sun unwinds and licks away.

  This is how it must be: her front sufficiently warmed, she turns

  and he must also turn, the spoon of meat he is all night, and hot,

  a film of almost-sweat across him like a condiment

  she cannot get enough of. He is rich, he thinks. He is taste

  and succulence. He is delicious. And if one bench of floodplain

  farther up and away from where they lie would be warmer,

  still he knows it would be too far, for her, from what she loves

  as much as she loves his hands and chest, his salt-skin shoulders

  and his breath: this river she cannot live without

  for long. He does not mind such faithlessness as that.

  She would be the trout she loves as much as she loves him,

  so therefore he lives alongside the water, breathing with her also,

  and when the sun at last clears the eastern ridge

  and the dew from the tent’s dome, like the river’s mists,

  is swallowed by the air, he like the mist rises,

  pared away from her, and builds her

  a small morning fire, and fires the water for coffee,

  and is allowed, as the most modest recompense, to stand

  and watch through the sliver of vent at the top of the tent door

  as she rises too, bare and half warm, to dress again

  for the day—the chilled breasts and backside

  submerged inside her clothes as the trout is

  in the river—for though he also loves the trout

  and will be all the sun long troubled

  by the difficulty of the lure, the fly, the hook that holds

  inside what appetite any of them might imagine,

  still he knows, come night, come the water’s icy vapors

  upward, that he will hold her as he might, lucky under the moon

  and near the trout—its beautiful meat and bone, its edible skin—

  where they sleep, on the round of the river’s cold lip.

  SWEET MAGNET

  It is the stage called “word salad,”

  says the neurologist: schizophasia—

  the patient’s lexicon cut loose

  from its roots, diced sometimes

  into awkward syllables but assembled

  into mostly recognizable syntax still.

  Mostly I am uneasy, my father,

  the patient, sitting between us,

  my mother and me, and saying nothing

  just now. True, he can’t remember

  where I live sometimes, and he wonders where

  the babies are, meaning my sister and me.

  When we’ve returned to his room,

  my father contemplates the back of his hand

  for a long time. Studies it, even, then says,

  “No, I believe that moon is bullshit.”

  Then he looks at his palm, and beckons me

  to come closer, so that I might hear

  and understand. “It’s presidential war,”

  he says. “That’s the way it’s always been

  with me. Toothpaste. The weather.”

  I agree. “Let’s get the car and drive far,”

  he says. “I loved that spaghetti necktie.

  Nothing to any of it but missing drums.”

  Speak what you will. Each glossolalium

  sings. At lunch the maraschino cherry

  in his fruit cocktail is a sweet magnet,

  the orderly’s mop is mysterious silver,

  and the slick of its wash across the floor

  is something about the soul of a spoon.

  ODE TO MY BOOTS

  Long hooves removed, sweat-stewed

  and leather-redolent. Foot hovels, laces

  cross-hatched up the fronts, tag ends untied,

  orphaned paren
theses, speechless tongues,

  heels and soles rounded by miles. Black eggs

  from which pale birds have emerged

  that step-by-step had flown wingless through the world

  in them. The pale intermediaries, the socks,

  fat woolen blossoms reborn as buds

  in the pure soil of waiting in the drawer, sheaths

  to be entered for the entering of the shaft,

  into the supple vamp, to be embraced by the welt,

  swaddled in the gussets and bound there.

  And bound also into the world, which accepts

  the boots as the boots accept the feet,

  earth which accepts the prints of the boots

  as the boots accept the prints the feet leave in them,

  miles of motion memorialized as stillness.

  My hand, reaching inside each boot,

  reads the history of my walking there,

  which is nowhere and anywhere:

  ten tentacles of pivot and balance;

  the two balls of power; the arches, synecdoches

  of a million steps; and the heels of transition

  and restraint. Fossils of perambulation,

  life-and-death masks of departure and return,

  blunt destinationless etchings of boot memory.

  These shed, heavy husks: years in them,

  though they have no notion

  of where they have been, and where,

  with luck, they may yet take me.

  ON A SERIES OF FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS

  As it would turn out, even under the weight of its considerable shell,

  the snail ascended the wall of an enclosure made of razor blades

  and slid across a battlement of seven honed edges on nothing

  but its unmysterious, whisper-thin, moon-shimmer glister, a whisker

  of which still sags in four of the six spaces between the blades

  but sits like miniscule pearlescent and orbicular spittles atop

  the glinty parapets themselves: see Figure 4, in which just the snail’s tail

  can be seen as it descends into the bowl of garden greens and radicchio

  that will be its reward. Figure 1 is also nice: the gelatinous horns

  cresting the castle wall; but Figures 2 and 3 comprise the point of it all:

  the little guy scudding over the awful edges like a schooner cresting

  waves, the canvas of his burled shell aflicker, suggesting great speed.

  DREAM OF THE TREE

  Before he dreamed of being the tree