Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems Read online

  he dreamed of being the owl.

  Before he dreamed of being the owl

  he dreamed of being the flicker.

  Before he dreamed of being the flicker

  he dreamed of being the buck.

  But the buck ran away, and the flicker

  flew, and the owl scuttled sideways

  out of sight, and all that was left

  was the tree he dreamed of being,

  so he dreamed of being the tree.

  He was sifting the sunlight and the light

  breeze swaying his needles just enough.

  He welcomed the owl and said good-bye

  to the flicker and the buck. He waved

  hello to the breeze and good-bye to it too.

  He let a bundle of brown needles fall

  and considered the man asleep at his foot.

  The clouds going by could not distinguish him

  from his brethren, and the ants

  leaving his skin to wander the man’s

  could not distinguish the man from him,

  but for maybe the warmth he also felt

  enter him from the man’s bark,

  which was of a color much like his own.

  He concluded that warmth was the by-product

  of sleep, and he dreamed he was the man

  asleep at his foot, dreaming of the buck,

  and then the flicker, and then the owl,

  before he remembered he was the tree,

  dreaming of being the man, asleep,

  dreaming of being the tree, dreaming.

  CATECHISM

  Next door the old pipe organ no longer wheezes.

  Here, the new one’s electric and hums.

  Here, too, upholstered pews, a last-twice-as-long-as-Jesus

  miracle fabric called Herculon, over foam the bums

  of bums will appreciate. And me, sixteen,

  sneaking out, faking a coughing spell,

  and bound for the old church next door, alone,

  but only for a while, I hope. The girl

  I’m meeting there is named Babette, known as Butch.

  Every Sunday for a month we’ve met there,

  in the choir loft. She’ll undress and let me watch,

  and then we’ll desanctify the place—the pews, the air,

  the ashtray a former organist abandoned.

  Afterward I’ll light my Kool with hers.

  The stained-glass window will be shot with sun

  this morning and give our skins a special shimmer.

  I almost believe I made this happen by praying,

  every Sunday for half a year, alone and morose,

  coming here and staying

  until the doxology. Butch is pretty without her clothes.

  If it is God from whom all blessings flow,

  then what I’ve learned in the choir loft is faith.

  Yes, she’s there, and already naked by the time I show.

  Holy, holy, holy, with her angelic mouth, she saith.

  RUSH

  The winter snow broke his arms.

  He’d lost his hat and his head,

  and I needed to rebuild him from

  the mud up, and so unzipped his fly,

  and there they were: a family

  of mice nested in the crotch

  of the pants that had once been mine,

  a squirm of pink pods, two

  of which tumbled out and down

  onto the spring-warm ground

  at our feet, and which I collected

  and slipped carefully back in.

  Then I zipped the fly again

  and waited until today, a month

  later in spring, the once fresh

  bale of straw having sprouted green.

  And yes, they’re gone now,

  all but the one whose foot it seemed

  I’d caught, pulling the zipper up,

  dun as a dry bean, mummified

  in the sepulchre of my former pants.

  I leave the fly closed this time,

  and the mouse carcass breaks loose

  and vanishes down a leg

  as I jam more and more straw

  down the waist hole to rebuild him,

  the scarecrow I used to call Steve,

  a name my wife, back in the years

  of our courtship, had bestowed upon

  that flesh of mine that had once

  lived also in those parts of those pants.

  Steve loved Diane in those days.

  Now there’s a spiffy belt of red

  baling twine, a farmerly blue work shirt,

  and somewhere down around his ankle

  a spot of gone meat, like a tumor

  or a lost, desiccate, misbegotten testicle

  I hope the ants will feast upon.

  This spring I give him a face as well,

  a Halloween mask of my son’s

  from a few years back—a radio talk-show

  blabbermouth—topped by the two-foot

  conical dunce cap of a highway hazard

  marker. Call it a cautionary tale, then:

  seemingly happy in my pants, with a plastic face,

  brainless, unable to dance, left arm

  raised in a fist of straw, blessedly silent,

  the scarecrow, nutless, with his new name.

  “AMERICAN ARCHANGEL”

  —Anne Sexton

  Having licked the birdbath dry, the moose lies down

  on the path to the front door: Alces alces phlegmatica.

  Photographable through the kitchen window, he cranes

  his broad neck westward for a nibble of autumn’s wild strawberry

  leaves. He won’t leave until he’s ready, and he’s not.

  I am, I have been made to know, too interested in him.

  He’s not an idea but a thing that shits thoughtlessly

  and in prodigious abundance wherever he wants, and he wants

  this morning, despite the dog’s incessant barking—not at the sight

  of him but at his half-ton scent—to rest. Therefore he rests.

  And therefore I, sequestered by his rest, rest myself

  in the bastion of my measly consequence, a consequence

  of his immensity, his territorial instinct, and his thirst.

  For every evening, on this, the dry side of the mountain,

  I fill the birdbath, and every morning he drinks it dry.

  Maybe what interests me is less moose than bird, a nuthatch

  that landed on the rim of the bath as he lapped,

  and drank its fill as well, flying away only

  when he lifted his massive muzzle and inclined his deep

  black sniffers its way, meaning, it seemed, no harm.

  I have seen the disembowelments of the peaceable kingdom.

  I’ve sawn a moose rack from the winter-killed head of one of his kind,

  having scared off a pack of coyotes in the process.

  I’ve rescued a nuthatch from the jaws of my own cat,

  and now I’m imprisoned in my house by the presence of a moose.

  Though not for long. He’s rising, unwinding his long legs

  and standing, stretching, shitting a peck of steaming bales.

  The bowl of the birdbath is dry but cool, I suppose,

  so he licks at it again, as though it is the blue itself

  he means to consume, or the rime of its mineral deposits.

  I cannot imagine, I confess, being uninterested in him.

  His dewlap sways, he twitches his side-skin at an itch,

  he heaves a gigantic breath and begins to move away,

  and it may be he is no blessing upon me. It may be

  there is no reason to speak of him at all.

  THE ART OF EXCAVATION

  The two-fingered sweep method works best,

  brushing aside the needle thatch and duff

  and exposing in the process more needle thatch

  and duff.
Although needle thatch and duff

  sounds like a firm of British barristers,

  and I am pleased already with my digging.

  Like me, the ground here is undisturbed,

  just as most memories are. Remembering nothing

  I ever wrote or drew, I remember nevertheless

  the flush of seeming wealth a Big Chief tablet

  gave me: virginal; bold, broad lines and page-wide,

  hyphenated intermediary ones the humps

  of aitches and kickstands of arrs nudged against

  and slanted from. Nary a thing to say nor a thought

  to render unto ideaness, though: the expanse of the page

  was a taunt this swath of nest-makings resembles

  not at all. First of all, there are these calcite knuckles

  of snails I uncover, little whorls aspiring to fossils.

  Then a bone sliver, a tooth. In truth, such treasures

  are everywhere, for soil is bone as much as bone is.

  Here’s a speckled fleck of eggshell and a diminutive knot

  of pine resembling the profile of a failed president.

  Here’s a feather tip stiff as a beached fin.

  Here’s a button I’ll take home and add to the box.

  (In the households of the wealthy, do such boxes

  exist? Admirals’ brass, ambassadorial pearl?)

  It was white once, this one. Now it’s the color

  of tea with cream. But wait. Here’s another,

  a deeper brown but otherwise identical. There’s a story

  here: she took the plackets and flung them wide,

  Amanda, the beautiful daughter of the mountain recluse,

  having her way with Pete, the mule skinner;

  or maybe it was Clifton, chasing a wounded buck,

  his right sleeve hung on a stob as he ripped them free.

  No, wait: I’m missing Amanda. But then, here’s

  the gleaming black toe from a deer’s hoof, then at last

  a pale, translucent root the color of semen

  and hairless as a worm, which, the mind wandering

  as it does at such an enterprise, I begin to unearth

  as carefully as an archaeologist uncovers a mandible.

  It stretches, at a more or less constant depth

  of six inches, almost the length of my leg

  to a bulbous, pithy, empurpled tumor

  the size of a softball, from which a single stem

  rises to the withered, desiccate blossom of a trillium.

  It’s a root gall, a mass of scar tissue become

  the individual itself, little pine forest Ahab face

  wounded into being but bearing into the world

  nevertheless its flower. And here’s the click

  of the black beetle crawling from under it,

  wondering what’s become of his roof,

  and there’s the clang of the triangle my wife uses

  to call me back from wherever it is I’ve gotten to,

  as per our arrangement: that I might return

  from my daily quest and reload the wood crib

  or sweep the spring-fallen pine needles

  from the porch, that I might become a productive man

  again, and not the sort who moseys through the woods

  or sits on his ass, probing the ground for nothing,

  although the buttons and the tooth are just what I need.

  PART FOUR

  PINIONED HEART IN THE HEAT OF IT

  SOCIALISTS

  Because he paid me union scale, I loved Christ

  Schuler and monkeyed iron and copper water pipes

  with his daughter, Katie O’Hare—KO, he called her,

  and she was that, although she also liked to fight.

  Not wrestle—which, when I could get ahold of her,

  we would—but punch, kick, gouge, and bite. I mooned

  over her teeth marks on my right shoulder for hours

  one night, but no matter how I contrived

  to contort my neck and stretch out my tongue,

  I could not lick them as I wished. Nor her,

  neither pugilistically speaking or otherwise.

  “You keep that pipe of yours away from my daughter

  or I’ll torque the thing clean off with this wrench,”

  Christ said, brandishing a fourteen-inch quick fit

  my way. Then he laughed. “She’s a sweet dumplin’,

  ain’t she?” On the door of his truck, “Christ’s Plumbing:

  Just Like Jesus Would Do,” the tailgate and bumper

  festooned with stickers extolling the wisdom of Eugene V. Debs,

  Norman Thomas, Albert Einstein, and Woody Guthrie.

  “KO’s hair’s as red as America’ll be someday,” he said.

  In every crawl space or basement, in some hidden spot

  no owner or landlord would ever be likely to see,

  he scrawled with a greasepaint pen the same slogan:

  When the people shall have nothing more to eat,

  they will eat the rich. And though I knew

  he meant the moneyed ones whose places we worked on,

  I confess the line’s Rousseauian prognostication

  was lost on me. All I wanted was to eat his sweet dumplin’ up.

  She taunted me, as we hefted eight-foot iron

  sewer pipes, debating the vileness of capitalist shit,

  and as she was indoctrinated by Christ, so by she was I.

  Come July I’d have made an incision in the gut

  of any plutocrat she’d aimed me toward, pulled loose

  a loop of intestine, and fed it to a hungry dog for her.

  And if she believed my conversion was not quite true,

  it was Christ himself who convinced her otherwise,

  saying over lunch his admiration for my grandfather,

  an International Worker of the World and doomed

  unionless coal miner dying even then of black lung.

  In the face of his praise I looked at KO and she was smiling.

  Which was how it came to be we came to be

  naked in the crawl space of a seedy complex

  of subsidized housing some shyster city father

  was paying us to plumb on the cheap. The freckles

  on her chest ended where the sun never shined,

  but I counted every one like a vote and felt

  as though it were not only Christ I was betraying

  but somehow my grandfather too,

  believing the things she’d told me for reasons

  having little to do with the downtrodden masses

  but, rather, that right before my eyes was her pale,

  unfreckled, and delectable ass, as she fed

  a length of second-rate copper water pipe up a hole

  between the floor joists and wiggled at me,

  then giggled. She’d be almost as old as I am today,

  if she had not vanished one morning on the way to school.

  They found her stripped, bound in baling twine,

  face up in a pond on the outskirts of town.

  Christ retired then and died a few years later,

  my grandmother insisted, of a broken heart.

  Katie O’Hare of the red, red hair, of the wedge

  of neckline and shoulder freckles, daughter of Christ,

  I loved you too, girl. The general theory was, you were

  too beautiful for an unknown monster to resist.

  The lesser thought was fascists, or some midwestern,

  right-wing, anticommunist, self-appointed death squad

  come to avenge your father’s un-American tailgate philosophy.

  Forgive me, if I find this latter take unlikely.

  But you should also know, that among the pipes and faucets,

  the toilets and showers of my hanging-by-its-fingertips

  middle-class, mostly mortgaged American home,

  I do
not see or hear the water issue forth or vanish

  without some thought of you and of your father.

  He would not recognize the nation of your birth.

  You fought hard, I’m sure, but your father

  had no country to fight for. Only the earth.

  He was, as you were, as I may be myself,

  someday, a citizen of the world.

  IN HIS SADNESS

  The intelligence of the birds had always pleased him.

  Magpies and ravens, mostly—how they flew

  along with the tractor, or lined the way

  to the boneyard like watchers at a parade,

  the tractor rocking under its bucket-load.

  But the old mule was too big for the bucket;

  so big, in fact, that he was sure, were he to fall it

  where it stood, the tractor could not

  drag the beast in chains all the way there.

  So he haltered it and led it, three or four steps

  at a time, over much of an autumn afternoon,

  to the half-filled ravine’s lip. And he understood

  that it must have been the tractor that drew the birds,

  for none were there, as he stroked

  the lathered neck and withers, and whispered

  his gratitude and consolation,

  then nestled the muzzle of the .45 behind an ear

  and turned his face away and tumbled it—

  he never called it anything but mule—into a gash in the earth.

  Smell of cordite then. Smell of dust. The mule

  came to rest among the years-woven nest of bones

  exactly on its back, a posture he knew

  the coyotes would appreciate. He also knew their howls

  as early as this evening might be heard,

  and as with the already arriving magpies and ravens,

  passing overhead as he walked back to the farm,

  this too, in his sadness, pleased him.

  SALVAGE

  “Disensouled,” he said, and a chill

  came over me, until I realized

  he meant only that the wreck I’d been inspecting

  had already been purchased. They were all

  wrecks. It was a junkyard, after all.

  I was looking for one the transmission,

  transfer case, and rear differential

  might be removed from and transplanted,

  although what drew me to this one

  was the shape of its wreckage: bashed

  perpendicularly by a tree, U-shaped down

  to the frame. But what had caught my eye

  and held it was the flattened bench of the seat