Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (4 page)

The house the widow sold us

contained, she said, an attic full of treasure

or trash, and it would be our adventure,

my wife’s and mine, to discover which.

And what it was, was a museum, a gallery,

or at the very least a monument

to the organizational skills of her late husband,

a veteran of World War I, dead many years.

Everything boxed, stacked, and labeled,

and every label gospel. “Two ’37 Ford

hubcaps, one dented,” and inside,

just that. “Shells from the beach, Atlantic,”

another from the Pacific. Old dishes,

so noted. A box of paper bags, another

of boxes. A box of “brown work pants,

never worn.” Another at the bottom

of a tall stack, “Assorted screws,” weighed

fifty pounds. And I, being less afraid

of spiders than my wife, was appointed auditor,

and found only accuracy and doodads:

there was a box in which I discovered—

I counted them—“fifty-four things

of no apparent use,” exactly as he’d said,

and I worked my way from the attic’s far end

to the one nearest the trapdoor back down

into the bedroom closet, stretching out

to take up from the decades’ accumulated dust

the final container of more than a hundred

I investigated there. In his usual

block-print letters, the following:

“Empty box”—which a first shake

seemed to confirm as true, but still

I looked inside to be sure. And may I say

how glad I was then, that by some dumb luck

I had begun my accounting,

as he must have wished someone to,

at that far, other end. And may

I also say how much my respect for him,

or her, as well as my compassion—

for her, for him, for all the world—

was increased at just that moment,

since this last box contained only,

in the same black marker, scrawled diagonally

across the bottom, the word
nothing
.

For she has, in this her twelfth year of hunting,

lost some weight in the summer, despite

the daily, even hourly, slaughter of everything

smaller than she and unable to escape her.

For she had for some time, unbeknownst to me,

relieved herself on my favorite dress shoes,

making them foul and fit only for the fire.

For though she be named after the place

she was born, as long as such legions as she requires

might be dispatched and often devoured

in whole or part, she is happy to be here

or there, it hardly matters otherwise.

For she does not like me, and I know not why,

and offer her each morning a tablespoon of cream,

which she will deign to lap a bit, then abandon

to the dog. For there is her purr

in the lap of my daughter, whose cat she was,

and there is her purr in the laps of my sons

and my friends, though her purr

in the lap of he who offers her cream

whirreth never. For the practical worth of her depredations

is the ratio by which those preyed upon

enter not the house. For the house is in the woods

and the woods are also full of those whose depredations

upon her are as avidly sought as hers upon her prey.

For she is luckier than her mother

and brother, gotten by owl, coyotes, or eagle,

or perhaps even one of those of the same order as she:

bobcat, lion, or lynx. For she is gray

and invisible, it seems. For she cougheth up

elaborate balls of her own fur upon the carpet

for me. For I have labored to love her

and have accomplished by such labors

an understanding, at least, since I have watched her

at the hunt and been inspired by the single-mindedness

and excellence of her predatory disposition.

For I have also wondered what manner of attentiveness

of my own I might have brought to bear

upon anything that could equal hers,

unless it be praise. For the sun and the moon,

for the plenitude of mice, and for the still-beautiful

back of the hummingbird she has left in the ashtray,

next to the chair on the porch of my shack.

For it is a calliope hummingbird,

smaller than my little finger, and its purple cowl,

in the time I have attended to this consideration

of its killer, has, without my notice, faded,

and Lenore herself has uncoiled from the chair

where she had slept for more than an hour,

and walked back into the woods,

to which I will toss

the hummingbird’s almost weightless body,

which she left me, so that I might feel

exactly the way I do right now.

The birdhouse made from a gourd is wired

to a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast post

of the shack. Two holes at the top—near where the stem was,

for a thong of leather to hang it by, which broke long ago—

are now the finger holes of the mournful wind instrument it’s become.

The broad, round bowl of it makes a sort of birdly

basso profundo that pearls through the steel, into the post,

into the floor joists and walls, in two notes: a slightly sharp D

and an equally sharp F, says the guitar tuner,

which explains why all my thinking these days

is in B-flat, a difficult key for all but the clarinet

and this sudden covey of nuthatches, whose collective woe

makes it a minor chord I am in the middle of.

Nothing to do but hoist such silks as the luff

of limbs and needles suggests, and sail on,

the barely-escaped-from-the-cat chipmunk chattering

like a gull, and the mountain’s last drift of snow

resembling the back of a sounding whale. Hear the thrum of the rigging,

Daggoo? Hear its profoundest woo, its sensible gobbledy-goo

and doo-wop, the boo-hoos of the spheres, by vectors and veers,

by tacks and refractal jabberings, taking us deeper into the weirdness

of the ghost sea those prairie hills were the bottom of once,

this nowhere we shall not be returning from.

Draw the lines! Assume the crow’s nest, Pip. This ship

sails on music and wind, and away with birds.

Italy, May 2011

We’ve been in Bogliasco a week

before we understand the bird that’s wakened us

each miserably early morning is a nightingale.

I am pleased by this, just as I was years ago,

when I had my picture taken in Rome,

kneeling next to the gravestone of John Keats.

Every time I look at that picture, I think,
There I am, kneeling

next to the gravestone of John Keats
. And this week,

wakened every dark morning before four, I think,

I’m hearing the same kind of bird Keats wrote of
, at Hampstead,

in one of the great odes of 1819, and it makes me a little sad

to confess that of them all I love the nightingale ode least.

Even the bird’s singing—fulsome and musical,

especially in the still-dark Ligurian morning—

does not appeal to me as it did to Keats. At this deep blue

and aubadial hour, it’s too loud. And too much.

But then, so is the fact that on Bartleby.com,

right there on my screen next to Keats’s poem,

is Alexia. She’s beautiful and pouty, barely dressed,

“in a relationship,” it says in Italian, but who

“
ha insoddisfatti desideri
.” She has “unsatisfied desires,”

in other words.
“Aiutala!”
it implores. Help her! Too much, yes,

but interesting: Keats, a nightingale, unsatisfied desires,

the longing for perfection, and Alexia. Here she is again,

this time alongside “To Autumn,” a poem I prefer,

although now I’m puzzled by both her abundance

and her ubiquity, since she’s next to the “Grecian Urn”

and “Melancholy” too. She’s
not
by the “Ode to Psyche,”

which is strange, since the first words of that one are

“O Goddess!” and clearly that’s what Alexia’s meant to appear

to anyone who comes upon her here. (She’s thirty-four, it says,

almost a decade older than Keats ever was.)

For some reason Bartleby prefers not to offer “Indolence” at all;

it’s nowhere on the site, though Keats himself described its subject

as “the only happiness…the body overpowering the Mind,”

something Alexia could be said to personify: a bold lover

one can never kiss. As for the figures on the urn, it’s true

they will live in supple youth and mad pursuit

as long as does the urn, and their desires will

in all that time go unsatisfied: boughs that cannot shed

their leaves, the piper who, unwearied, pipes new songs forever,

the figures forever warm and still to be enjoyed, forever

panting, forever young. Some believe Keats died a virgin.

Others think his most worldly friend, Brown,

surely took him to a brothel once. Meanwhile, here in the dark

Italian morning, I left the woman I love in bed a floor below

in order to investigate a bird whose song I never heard

except in words. I made my way to where, thousands of miles

from home and all my books, I could examine

how such a thing might matter to me. And when I sought

Keats’s poems electronically, there was Alexia,

and since then I have thought more of her than of Keats,

or my beloved, or the nightingale still singing outside.

Even leaning dangerously far out the studio window,

I can’t see it. And back on the computer screen, Alexia—

despite the almost two-centuries-old, deathless lines

to her right—insists that it is she who should have my attention,

even as the nightingale sings on. Of love,

Keats said, “It is my religion. I could die for it.”

He also said, “I would sooner fail than not be among

the greatest,” and then he died, believing himself a failure.

If I abandon this task soon and return to our room,

I’ll find my lover in bed, sleep-warm and soft. But still,

there remains something I have not said and believed I could.

I thought it had to do with poetry, but it seems I was wrong.

Keats’s desire was to make something beautiful and true,

to feel the satisfaction not only of knowing he’d done so,

but to believe that the world would see it and acknowledge it too.

And still, that acknowledgment came too late to do him any good.

One more, and among the least, in the endless human plague

of unsatisfied desires. And what I might have said, or might yet,

has little to do with the viewless wings of Poesy,

and more to do with the way the dull brain perplexes and retards

the body’s progress toward love. Imagine writing the line,

“More happy love! more happy, happy love!” What does it mean

that I can’t? Her lack of satisfaction makes Alexia look miserable

in an ever-so-ravishable way, but if I clicked on “
Aiutala
,”

I would be no closer to her than I am to Keats.

Therefore, the villa’s twenty-four stone stairs

back down to the second floor fly by as swift as in a dream,

and when I’m back in my bed and my lover’s arms again,

it is my mind that reawakens and overpowers, for a while at least,

my body, and I speak: nothing of Alexia, Keats, the nightingale, or the odes;

nothing of how tender the night has been, or the least sickness for home;

only remembrance, softly: that she recall the night of the day

she took my picture as I knelt by the grave of a Young English Poet.

Weary from hours walking the ancient streets of Rome,

we lay on a rooftop terrace no more than a hundred yards

from the room he died in. In the distance, St. Peter’s dome

glowed silver-blue. Remember? We were there all night,

and all night, gulls from the Tiber passed overhead, squawking.

No one would ever describe their calls as soulful or melodious,

but that night, I say, they were beautiful, and she is satisfied.

Not a bonehead, though yes, we called

the class she was enrolled in that—those

of us who taught such classes, believing

that mucking among the illiterates was beneath us.

We were meant for finer things: the joys

of allusion and figure, the lushness that is literature.

And yet, for this assignment, the dreaded process

paper, for which I had encouraged them

to consider nothing too mundane or daily,

she had written—in contrast to her dreary

colleagues, the changers of oil and bakers of cookies—

a paper that, step-by-step, described

in impressive and vastly appealing detail

her morning shower. She was not guileless either.

She knew I could not—as I confronted

each paragraph’s sequential topic sentence—

not
imagine her there: first her hair, then her face,

then her body from her arms and shoulders to her waist,

and from her feet back up to what she called—

most fetchingly—her “possibles,” which

by such mention she must have known those too

I could not possibly help but imagine. She finished

by shaving her underarms and her legs,

wrapping a towel around her, and combing out her hair.

O, let us learn, I thought to myself that day, humility

and all the humble pitfalls and perils of language

and instruction. If there were a career in bathing

and reporting the processes thereof, she was home free.

And there were jobs, I did not doubt, that her paper,

offered as a letter of application, might well land her,

if only she sat across the desk from someone

not at all like me and beamed the way she did,

mostly in pride. I struck three semicolons,

one of them used correctly but pointlessly.

She leaned in very close; she was not pleased

with her A-minus, but honestly thrilled.

I realized I was hardly older than she was,

but at the weekly meeting with my own colleagues

I did not speak of her at all, nor of the ballplayer

who’d threatened to break my nose if he did not pass,

nor of the tree-crushed, almost quadriplegic former logger

whose papers were transcribed by an amanuensis

of nearly intolerable linguistic ignorance. This would be

my life for some years. It was a way to live.

The girl aimed to be a nurse and marry a doctor.

The ballplayer went to the bigs and became

a millionaire. The hired scribe left the logger

in his motor-driven wheelchair on a dock by the river,

to fish, and somehow the motor joystick was nudged

just enough so that he tumbled in and drowned.

The scribe, from the office of occupational rehabilitation,

in an act supremely needless and disarming,

brought the logger’s final paper to me

and wept in my office like a baby.