Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (3 page)

One lies on one’s back in the woods, savoring the sun,

and for some reason one has opted

for what Fowler calls the “false first person pronoun”—one,

that is, over the other. One brushes an ant from one’s ear.

One peers up into the breeze-swayed branches

of a ponderosa pine, one among many

one has arranged oneself under. Perhaps the wind,

which is easy and warm, dislodged the ant

one swept from one’s ear, meaning

it had fallen many times its height to land there,

in the whorl of the ear of one. In truth, one wishes

for the tongue of a sylph instead of an ant. Even two sylphs,

one thinks, though perhaps it is not sylphs one means—

they being invisible spirits of the air—

but rather the slender girls of one’s conjuring. (One conjures,

one admits.) Thinking one dead, a deer approaches.

One imagines being a deer, but then one rises

to a seated position, so that the deer will startle

and run. If only one could run as a deer does.

If one were not so weary, one would that very deer chase

a ways, beguiled by the wave of its white tail.

But no, one is molten. One seems to have no bones.

One shall not run, not now, nor even rise.

Instead, one shall subside to one’s supine pose

and by the sun through the needles of the trees be dappled.

Though of course one should avoid the word
dappled
.

One knows this. Yet something about the sun

and the sway of the shadows makes one

larcenous as well as slothful. And as one acknowledges

one’s Hopkinsian trespass, one notes

perhaps the same sort of finch spoken of

in his poem and sees one’s borrowing as praise.

Of the finch, that is, although it dawns on one

that this particular finch is an American goldfinch,

and one decides one’s praise is for him instead, the poet.

One feels literary and allusive then. It seems one’s time

upon one’s back in the woods is not wasted after all.

There is the
squeegee-squeegee-squeegee-squeegee
song

of the goldfinch. One is delighted by the nineteen
ee
s

in the preceding line, not one of which has been written,

since one is reclined under the trees

with none of the usual writing implements. (One counts them

in one’s head and upon one’s fingers instead.) One’s 1965

Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Fowler’s
Modern

English Usage
delights one also, though it is a quarter mile away

and stamped with the name and address of a dead woman

one knew once. One knew her and she died, and one is glad

to have known her, for she was droll and brilliant,

although one wishes one had known her when she was young.

Once one was young but is no longer,

though one still conjures as if one were—sylphs, women,

the too-soon dead, the chaste and priestly poets of yore.

Otherwise, one does not imagine one is certain of much.

In fact, one is almost asleep, but then a hawk alights

on the limb directly above, a rabbit in its talons.

One’s breath is held. One perceives the soul

of the rabbit does not abide. One dares not move,

even though one’s face and white T-shirt

will soon be dappled with the rabbit’s blood.

One imagines. One thinks of the one one loves

and knows that she will startle

to see one’s bloody face and shirt.

One will stand seemingly wounded and speak to her

of wind and sun, the hawk and its prey, the finch and the deer,

even Fowler (all things whose beauty is past change),

and the one one loves will not understand at first

when one insists that one must never be

the last one

to die.

The new porch light casts a much brighter glow

and an immense, probably sixty-foot-long shadow

of me out beyond the woodshed, where I’m bound.

And everyone knows, having learned the mechanics

of shadows in childhood, that with each step I take

away from the light, the shadow grows even larger,

though fainter and therefore less impressive.

I like to watch the darkest version of myself stacking

stove logs in the rack, each one the bulk

of a steer, and adding them to a truck-sized black rectangle

attached to the infinite darkness of the house.

Or of its shadow, at least. And when I walk

empty-handed back to the shed, I peer into that dark

and see, thrown across the snow, a bright trapezoid of gold

from the bedroom window, where your own shadow

undresses for bed, much larger than in real life, it’s true,

but still too small for one so titanic as I have become.

Soon, however, I will return to the house, turn off

the porch light, stuff three or four logs in the stove,

and enter the bedroom then lit only by our two small

bedside lamps, hardly casting shadows at all.

He must have known the feeling, Jack Driscoll,

first mate of the SS
Venture
, with whom Ann Darrow

had fallen in love on the way to the island,

before Kong, before his enormous, expressive eyes

and his very black and gentle hands had held her

a quarter mile in the air over Manhattan.

It would never have left him, that feeling,

for all the years of their lives together, as she peered,

just like you do, into his sad, inadequate gaze.

1

Those were the days of sleeker deliveries,

blonde idealism, Marilyn in the moon.

In the town I grew up in, some dozen

burgeries featured them, wielding trays

sometimes as teeteringly stacked

as were their deliverers, whom the bosses knew

would draw as many customers as the food—

and no doubt they did—although looking back

I loved the food too, the ground beasts

and cheese, the abundantly salted fries,

the tiny plastic bowls of coleslaw

there beneath the lights, on trays where rested

also the frosted, sweaty mugs of root beer.

And if things were slow, an actual girl

might linger for a minute and converse,

banter, or tease, until over there

some brighter car or handsomer, older guy

pulled in. They carried at their waists

dispensers and repositories of change

that jingled when they went away.

2

They’re still around, here and there,

though some are boys, like tonight’s,

who calls me “sir,” a label itself archaic,

all that sixty-year-old music in the air.

Larkin’s sitting next to me, long-gone

Philip, eyeing the girls and feeling bitter

about the boy and wishing for a warm beer.

“Mightn’t a chap just ask for that redheaded one?”

he asks. And I confess it’s my fault.

I should have picked a different slot.

But then he sees, from his seat

on the passenger side, a leggy brunette

haul a burdened tray to the car next door

and reaches out a pale, ghostly hand

to pat her ass, and fails, then sighs. “I can’t stand

being dead,” he says, trying to be here

but being nowhere. Then he asks, “Have any luck

with one of these in your day, then?”

Now we’re talking. There were some, back when,

who’d hop in back and fuck and fuck

you up in turn. He winces at the allusion.

Everything grows farther away:

carhops, the moon, parents, night. It’s strange;

the carhop turns and screams through my illusion.

March 11, 2011

Earlier tonight an owl nailed the insomniac white hen.

She’d fluttered up onto a fence post to peer at the moonlight,

to meditate in her usual way on the sadness of the world

and perhaps the hundreds of vanished eggs of her long life here.

I was watching from the porch and thinking she ought not to be

where she was, and then she wasn’t, but taken up, a white hankie

diminishing in the east, one the owl would not ever drop.

Now an hour after, the new night wind spins up a leghorn ghost

of her fallen feathers, under the moon and along the meadow grass.

Corpse candle, friar’s lantern, will-o’-the-wisp chicken soul

dragging its way toward me, that I might acknowledge her loss

and her generosity, and wonder again about her long-standing

inability to sleep on certain nights. There are sky lights

beyond our understanding and dogs whose work it is to scent

the cancer no instrument can see. On the nights she could not sleep,

the hen Cassandra Blue perched herself with a clear view to the west

and studied the sky, every two seconds canting her head a few degrees

one way or the other. What she saw or if she saw it I cannot say,

though it seemed that something, always, somewhere, was about to go

terribly wrong. Then again, it always is. Now there’s a swirl

of wind in the meadow, spinning three or four final white feathers

west to east across it, and there’s a coyote come foolishly out

into the open, hypnotized by feather flicker, or scent, then seeing

by moonlight the too-blue shimmer of my eyes, and running for its life.

Freeing a crossways stob of fractured pine, perhaps,

the man who’d saved himself one trip down the ladder

to the off switch and still another one back up,

and who’d saved himself that same trip so often

he was proud of the vertical miles unclimbed

and undescended, and the sweat from them he had not sweated,

but this time, by some slip or somehow-too-far stretch, he fell

straight down the slick steel throat of the wood chipper

headfirst, taking whatever had stopped it with him

and vanishing in an instantaneous blat and a ghost

of blood vapor, becoming, like that, a pile of human pulp

in the half-full trailer of a chip truck scheduled in fifteen minutes

for the mill. Or so it was theorized by company investigators

and a man sent from the office of occupational safety,

whose suggestion that an off switch might be installed

at the top of the platform as well as the bottom

was implemented, though not mentioned in the final report

or in the newspaper. The one whose pages were made

from pulp that might have, despite the long boil

and bleaching process, contained some rendered human element

as well, although the paper also went on at length to describe

the company’s generous settlement, not required, given the cause

was worker avoidance of corporate safety regulations.

No word, however, on whose job it must have been

to recover what could be of the body in the trailer.

Supple bone shards, mostly, unidentifiable nodules

of tissue, three swatches of scalp still haired. They were a man

and a woman, two employees of the state department of health,

one of whom also retrieved, with tweezers, and offered

to the victim’s wife, the minute hand from his watch.

PART TWO

POSSIBLES

September 2010

The aggravation of reading philosophy

to fall asleep is that you can only sleep

while reading. Once you turn out the light,

you’re awake again, swamped in conundrums

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.