Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (2 page)

The steer has found, among the mud

and diminishing islands of snow,

a cropped-off but less coagulate expanse

where it can lie and sleep awhile.

From where I watch, I can see

the quiver of an ear, a hind hoof

gently twitching, the ordinary mammalian

evidence that it is dreaming. But of what?

I wonder. Fields of tall grass forever?

A hay crib Jesus dispensing infinite fodder?

Or maybe not of food at all but the litheness

of its cousins, the deer and the elk,

those dreams that materialize each night,

when it must merely doze in the darkness,

vigilant, awaiting, once again, the light,

so that it might, as it does now, dream.

Though it may be in this way I diminish it.

It may be the cowbird, just a moment ago

having alighted on its broad neck, is Nyx,

consort of Erebus; that it dreams the day

is the night. Or perhaps the cowbird is no bird

at all, but the dream, and the dream is flying.

And what of me then? Even in its sleep

it may be aware of the presence of the maker

of fences, bringer of the gun, conjurer

of the high-backed truck and the hunchbacked

butcher, builder of the gut pile the ravens

and magpies will celebrate, for as long

as the furtive night dogs will allow, though now,

in sun and full sleep, it fears not, as it lifts

and pumps its enormous wings and soars

over the vast brown and white body of the earth.

Never especially inclined mathematically, my father,

days past his eightieth birthday, calculated the following:

if the names of all the dead, military and civilian alike,

of every nationality, from his war—the good one—

were blasted into granite, as were those of only

the American soldiers who had perished in the bad one, mine,

the resulting monument would be almost a mile long

and a hundred feet deep. Setting aside the engineering challenges,

he believed the greater problem was the names. Sixty million,

he ciphered, though I don’t know how. His imagined monument,

a project no greater than the interstate highway system

or the dams across the nation’s rivers, could take decades

to erect. No more than Rushmore or Crazy Horse.

And yet who would have envisioned such a task?

I remember how, the night of the first moon landing,

he stood in his backyard in the heart of the heart of the country,

straining through binoculars to see what could not be seen

but was. Now ten years past his monumental calculations,

the only numeral that matters to him is 2. We are not sure why.

Perhaps because my sister and I are two. As are he

and our mother, her failing eyes and gentle hands. And therefore

“two” is the answer to every problem the young neurologist poses,

a physician not much older than my own children,

none of whom ever lived through something called the draft.

My father does not know what year we are in or the name

of our current president. Even the names of his grandchildren

are lost to him sometimes, and if we were to ask

that name by which he calls himself, we fear that, too,

may be gone. He does not know, and probably never did,

the word
cenotaph
, though the memorial he once imagined

would have been just that, an empty tomb.

Father, let me estimate the dead for you:

it has been and will be everyone. Let us understand

that mountains are—like plains and swamps,

like rivers and oceans—death and life factories, forges from which

come numberless souls, residents on a spinning blue cenotaph

that without us has no name nor need of one.

These were the dead of a single war, these the dead

of the others. And here are those who died, as we say, in peace,

some whose lives have faded within them until they are

only the names and numbers they had been known by.

And here is where they were, beneath a cyclical moon,

which bears through the universe some footprints and a flag.

Is it even possible not to dream,

or not remember what one dreams of,

all the while a loop of endless music

going round and round in the mind? Last night,

every time I woke, it was “Moonlight Serenade,”

a song first recorded twelve years before

my birth—two weeks before my father’s

seventeenth birthday—then rereleased four years

later, in 1943, the middle of his Navy stint,

as a “V-Disc.”
V
for Victory, of course.

All night long, the melody’s mild clarinets,

muted trumpets in jazzy counterpoint.

It did not come from nowhere, though,

this Glenn Miller classic, a four/four fox-trot.

I remember its red, white, and blue label,

from the Special Services Division, Music

Section of the War Department, a relic.

For an hour last night, my wife and I lay in bed

and spoke of our fathers. Hers, who’d said

if she’d been among the protestors at Kent State

she too would have deserved to be shot,

and mine, who in a singular act of anger

had broken a record I thought I loved.

In what way is one shaped by such a thing?

she wondered. Had anyone ever said to me

anything like what her father said to her?

And I told her no, although I thought of

Fresh Cream
, the album mine had broken.

I’d been trying to learn the Clapton solo

on “I Feel Free,” sitting with my guitar

before the speaker. I’d gone away, forgetting

the record there, and came back just in time to see it

shatter against a wall. They’re both love songs.

In his, the man sings to his beloved in the light

of the moon; in mine, in the end, she is the sun.

Now my father’s almost ninety. He wouldn’t remember

having done such a thing, and I have no interest

in reminding him. We were at war in 1967.

He was just home from work. It is unclear

which of us was more miserable in his life then.

My mother promised she would buy me

a new one. My father reclined in his chair

to wait for dinner, before he dressed

and left for his second job, selling cars.

It is unclear if the money he made those nights

was necessary, though I think his absence was.

I did not think last night of his love for Glenn Miller.

I was not aware as my wife and I drifted into sleep

that “Moonlight Serenade” was loosed in my mind,

though I recalled this morning it was there

at each of my brief and sleepy awakenings.

And as it was all night, so it has been all day.

Clarinets and muted trumpets, managing

to be both melancholy and Caucasianally cool.

I remember he closed his eyes and seemed asleep

in his chair. I remember my mother’s promise

and the single proviso she extracted from me:

that I say not a word of it over dinner.

And so I seethed and said nothing else either,

which must have made it, from her point of view,

among the most successful and pleasant

of our dinners in those days. She had left

Glenn Miller spinning, the changer arm up,

so that the song played again and again,

as it has in my mind for fifteen continuous hours now,

wordless through that day’s stewed beef heart

and mashed potatoes, and through my lunch today as well—

some yogurt and fruit, a handful of nuts,

for now I am sixty, and while it is unclear

if I have any interest in reaching the age my father is,

I go on as though it were perfectly clear.

In 1967, he’d begun the long fall from faith,

believing never in God but somehow

in the nation, while I’d been spared any sense

of the holiness of either. Imagine an hour passed,

dinner eaten, my father having showered

and put on a tie, “Moonlight Serenade” still

and now eternally going. My mother tosses

a dish towel over her shoulder, and they dance

a few steps around the kitchen. I can see them

from the living room where I sulk and glare.

It must have been that day, in the midst

of rage and woundedness and fruitless stewing,

that his song became so deeply etched in my memory.

A moment ago I called it up from a computer file—

no vinyl, no tape, no disc at all, another victory

for technology, like virtual memory or unmanned drones—

and it unrolled from the speakers exactly

as I’ve been hearing it for a whole night and half a day,

its now primitive recorded nature preserved

almost perfectly, but for the absence of the needle’s hiss.

In those days you either paid no attention to it

or else never dreamed it would go away.

If you are old enough to remember records—

forty-fives, seventy-eights, and thirty-three LPs—

you might also remember the ghost that lived

at the gleaming ungrooved lip of them, the way,

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.

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.

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.