Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems Read Free Page B

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.

TIMEX
    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

DESCARTES
    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.

DADA DOODADS
    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,”