Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems Read online

  stained almost entirely a deep ocherous brown.

  “Them people never knew what hit ’em,”

  he said. “Tree come down on the highway.”

  He shuffled his toothpick from the left

  side of his mouth to the right. “Act of God.”

  There was a rig down the way a bit

  he said I ought to see. “Other way around,

  this one,” he said. “Truck hit the tree.”

  The impact, far to the right, blew the engine

  due left and broke the bellhousing off,

  but the drivetrain looked solid and sound.

  “Lookit there,” he said. A perfect half-orb

  blasted into the safety glass of the windshield.

  “Fella’s head,” he said, working around it,

  as he wrote on the windshield, “Sold.”

  “AIN’T NO USE”

  Sarah Vaughan, 1959

  As I listen, I like to imagine her

  at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago,

  every man in the place aware

  no one’s ever sung the song so,

  nor so perfectly. And by that perfection

  is the wound at the source of it

  turned salt within the wound it inflicts back,

  the long-held vibratos felt

  in the tongue and every other elsewhere

  another tongue might have been.

  Look at her. She’s up there

  in the lights and smoke. Sweets Edison’s

  indeeding and amening chumps

  and true fools through the mute

  of his I-am-right-next-to-her trumpet

  and tells them all she don’t give a hoot

  if she ever hears your name again.

  There is no part of her body not

  singing now, not a single blessed thing

  among the tenderest and most powerful parts

  of who she is inside it, inside the skin,

  under the dress and the lights, in the building

  on Rush Street, under Chicago’s wind

  and a few city stars hardly showing.

  It’s also me she’s singing to, I imagine.

  The recording’s fifty years old, but oh, how

  she sings, there in Mister Kelly’s establishment,

  although the building is a steakhouse now.

  IRIS NEVIS

  They’re from southern California or Texas,

  a couple from actual Dixie-like places

  with good barbecue, cockroaches, and humidity.

  They’re almost used to snow, come February.

  Today, however, is a whiteout.

  We gather at the tall windows and cannot see

  the familiar secretary across the way, rolling a rock of type

  up the mountain of her screen, nor the courtyard, its picnic table

  resembling a snow-covered car. And still

  the sun not only beams down through it all,

  it’s also made an arc of light across the sky above us,

  a snowbow—shimmering, electric, and magnificent.

  I can hardly get them to return to their desks

  and the task at hand, a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson,

  who, being from Maine, knew a few things about snow,

  and to whom the last soul standing at the window bears,

  though he does not know it, a remarkable resemblance:

  hair slicked from a part down the middle of his head,

  gold-rimmed glasses, and a mustache

  the size of a bratwurst waxed into points

  on either side of his pale, bereaved-looking face.

  They’ve never seen anything like it, the snowbow, I mean,

  and mustachioed Corey—the student at the window,

  from Baton Rouge—is still standing there

  when Margo—she of the blue hair and tattoos,

  a girl from the Montana Hi-Line—turns to him.

  She’s intense, her fairly new tongue stud sometimes clicks

  against the back of her teeth when she’s excited.

  She takes his right hand in both of hers

  and startles him from his reverie. And there they are,

  silhouetted against the blowing snow, Corey

  looking down and seeing in Margo’s eyes

  the same amazing thing he could not turn away from,

  until he does and returns to his chair. We would tell you,

  if we knew, the story that will unfold from them,

  the many ways we cannot see, of which this

  is the least, having to do not with the snow

  or the light but what even they themselves could not know,

  that he would break her heart repeatedly.

  STOP AND LISTEN

  Sometimes the woods at night are so still

  the sound of your own breath

  abashes you, to say nothing

  of the racket as you walk.

  Sometimes talking helps, saying

  a poem, or even, if you’re going downhill,

  singing. Other times there’s nothing

  to do but stop and listen, or even sit

  and close your eyes in the name

  of attentiveness. In daylight,

  there are birds, and for some reason

  the wind too is always awake,

  delivering weather or dust.

  At night, you concentrate,

  your listening is enhanced,

  and sooner or later you will hear

  a scale of bark let loose from a tree

  or a needle tick from limb to limb

  on its enormous journey to the earth.

  And sometimes, having resumed

  your walk, you will stop at the top

  of the ridge above your house.

  Its window lights will illumine the ground

  around it, and you will listen again

  and hear the faint hum of it—

  the buzz of its lightbulbs, the industry

  of its clocks. And sometimes

  you will approach it as would a thief

  and peer through the windows,

  in order that you might covet,

  being part of the world’s greater silence,

  everything that is already yours.

  CALENDAR

  I wish the month had one more day, or even two,

  or that, in truth, I might live it again, if only

  so that Lola might be with me a little while longer.

  Not that the month has been anything special

  in regards to her. Most of it I spent

  away, and even the time with her,

  in the light of her devastating, sultry gaze,

  the fabulous black teddy, the sheer pink

  negligee, the one visible garter snap,

  the black hose, the carmine garter belt itself,

  and the high-heeled pink mules, to say nothing

  of the way she is seated on the golden

  sheen of the love seat, or the way the right

  cup of the teddy creates the most perfect

  ripple of flesh at the side of the breast

  it lifts just enough to cast a slender shadow

  between it and the other one, nor even

  the way her left leg is tucked under the right

  thigh or the way she holds the heel of that mule

  in her right hand as though bracing herself

  against herself. Even in all this glory,

  the time I spent with her consisted of nothing

  more than the occasional glance

  until today. Tomorrow I’ll move on

  to the beauty of next month, which, like every one

  but this one, is nameless in a special way.

  Four weeks ago, Firebelle; tomorrow, A Warm Welcome.

  But today, dark already at four-thirty in the afternoon,

  a snowstorm blowing in, it is Wednesday,

  the thirtieth of Lola, 2011.

&
nbsp; THE SCHOLAR

  We were to know we would never know

  as much about it as he did. He knew

  we didn’t care and believed his knowing

  was evidence. He was a scholar,

  a critic, a wielder of wit for it,

  its minutiae and mysteries,

  which for him were no mystery at all.

  Machinery, maybe. Cogs and pistons,

  the pinioned heart in the heat of it.

  Someone asked about love, the fool.

  Our backs ached. The sun was relentless.

  He leaned on his hoe as though

  it were a podium, drew a kerchief

  from his pocket and wiped his face.

  He pointed at the sky, where a hawk hovered,

  awaiting the mouse that would bolt

  from our work. One mouse was just

  like another, and we were more or less

  the same, except for what we’d never know,

  which we knew, even without his saying so.

  ANNA KARENINA

  The inquisitive look on the dog’s face

  makes me happy, suggesting not only her intelligence

  but my own, for having such a intelligent dog

  in the first place. Although what it is

  she wonders about I do not know. Seated in my chair,

  a book in my lap, I looked up and there she was,

  regarding me, as though she wondered

  what this book from the library, so redolent

  of others like myself, might offer me

  that she herself could not. But now she seems

  less inquisitive than wry, as though the compendium

  of sense I find my way through, she, via the scents

  only she is capable of apprehending, knows. Perhaps

  someone shed a tear on a page I am yet to reach,

  someone freshly washed, although the robe

  she wore was not and gave traces of someone else,

  someone she, the weeping woman, also sensed

  in its folds, which the dog reads just as I read

  the words, at this point in the volume,

  not the sort anyone would cry over.

  Do you want out? I ask her, and walk to the door

  and open it. But she only looks up at me,

  less inquisitive or wry than perplexed now,

  and I begin to understand we will never understand

  each other. Even when I sit on the floor

  and call her to me, she seems uncertain

  but allows me to stroke her head and neck

  and soothe her, as she also soothes me,

  although soon I rise and go back to the book,

  each of us, in our own ways, unhappy.

  ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY

  Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee

  and informed the seven of us in his charge

  his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man

  he never knew, had been possessed,

  as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor

  and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also

  that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother,

  born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said,

  along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair,

  we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember.

  As we should also always remember to call him

  only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive,

  and never, he warned, by his given nor surname,

  least of all with the title “mister” attached,

  which would remind him of that same most hated father

  and plunge him therefore into a mood

  he could not promise he would, he said, “behave

  appropriately within.” Fortunately, our job,

  unlike the social difficulties attached thereto,

  was simple: collect the trash from the county’s back roads.

  Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness,

  this meant not only beer cans and bottles,

  all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but also

  the occasional condom too, as well as the festering

  roadkill, fresh and ridden with maggotry,

  or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar

  with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed

  into the bed of the township truck we ourselves

  rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments

  then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette.

  Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloaded

  our tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston,

  sexton of the dump and the dump’s constant resident,

  in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailer

  we marveled at and strangely envied, since every inch

  of wall we could see through the open door

  was plastered with foldouts and pages

  from every Playboy and nudie magazine

  he had ever found among the wreckage there.

  Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth.

  Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known,

  by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yards

  of his hovel, that he never bathed. And once,

  while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22

  from beside his door and popped

  with amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us,

  then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out,

  and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rack

  to dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hide

  coat we could see, come the fall, except for school.

  As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathom

  and Lucy had no use for. On the truck’s dash

  all that summer Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,

  a tome he said he’d read already eleven times,

  this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way,

  it might have had to do with something like the gallery

  Stump’s trailer contained, the first word of its title

  meaning something to us, the last nothing at all.

  There were things about men we might be

  unable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky.

  And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat,

  fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shade

  with Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats.

  The town we came from was sinking into the emptiness

  of a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it,

  and rats were more common than hares

  and universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed,

  as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity—

  the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenance

  of rats the very earth offered up like a plague,

  the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump,

  whose name, as it was scrawled on his mailbox,

  seemed to be Stumplin Reilly McCarriston, Esquire.

  Of the seven of us, one would die in Vietnam;

  one, after medical school, would hang himself

  from a beam in his parents’ basement; the others

  merely gone, vanished in actuality if not in memory.

  Leaving me, alone, to tell this story. How Stump

  would spend his last twenty years in prison,

  having shot Lucy—one slender, flattening .22 slug

  through the forehead—as he stood fifty feet away,

  balanced atop the tub of an ancient wringer washer,

  arms extended, like Jesus Christ, said Stump,

  whose trailer was bulldozed into the dump itself

  even before the trial, and who, no doubt, by some

  court-app
ointed lawyer if not the appalled sheriff himself,

  was forced to bathe and shave, to step into the unknown country

  of a scentless white shirt and black businessman’s trousers,

  in order to offer his only yet most sincere defense:

  that Lucifer—Mr. Doolin, as the court insisted—had told him to.

  TO AUTUMN

  Most beautiful aspen tree, I admire the way

  a wound some buck grinding his horns

  against your trunk has healed to a pale gray

  that accentuates your beauty now, a decade later on.

  And as today’s autumn storm undresses you leaf

  by delicate gold leaf, I watch until you stand

  utterly bare, as we say of your kind so unsheathed.

  If I’d thought, as the storm began,

  that you would be less lovely uncovered,

  forgive me. What did I know, just a man

  watching from a window, who, having observed

  and studied a wet leaf plastered against the pane,

  missed, among the hundred others whirling past

  in the swirl and toss of the rain, the very last.

  NOTES

  The first four epigraphs are taken from Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, New York: NYRB Classics, 2001. The fifth is from the poem “Smiles,” by Wislawa Szymborska, from View with a Grain of Sand, New York: Harcourt, 1993.

  “Friendly Fire”: A V-Disc was a morale-boosting initiative involving the production of several series of recordings during World War II, by special arrangement between the United States government and various private U.S. record companies. The records were produced for use by U.S. military personnel overseas. Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” was among the most popular songs of the era. No trace has ever been found of the small plane that Miller vanished in.

  “First Person”: The poem referred to is “Pied Beauty.” Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Poems, New York: Macmillan, 1957.

  “Earthquake Light”: Tohoku earthquake, Japan, March 11, 2011.

  “Nightingale Capability”: The poem makes use of several verbatim passages from Keats’s odes, not all of which are in quotes.

  “The History of Gods”: See Richard Preston’s article about the great trees and about research scientist Professor Stephen C. Sillet, in The New Yorker, February 14, 2005.

  “American Archangel”: “Moose,” Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

  “Socialists”: KO is named for Kate Richards O’Hare, American Socialist Party activist, who was imprisoned during World War I. Eugene V. Debs: “I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world.”