Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems Read Free

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.

KONG
    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