Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems Read Free Page A

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.

CARHOPS, WITH LARKIN
    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.

EARTHQUAKE LIGHT
    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