Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (6 page)

It is the stage called “word salad,”

says the neurologist: schizophasia—

the patient’s lexicon cut loose

from its roots, diced sometimes

into awkward syllables but assembled

into mostly recognizable syntax still.

Mostly I am uneasy, my father,

the patient, sitting between us,

my mother and me, and saying nothing

just now. True, he can’t remember

where I live sometimes, and he wonders where

the babies are, meaning my sister and me.

When we’ve returned to his room,

my father contemplates the back of his hand

for a long time. Studies it, even, then says,

“No, I believe that moon is bullshit.”

Then he looks at his palm, and beckons me

to come closer, so that I might hear

and understand. “It’s presidential war,”

he says. “That’s the way it’s always been

with me. Toothpaste. The weather.”

I agree. “Let’s get the car and drive far,”

he says. “I loved that spaghetti necktie.

Nothing to any of it but missing drums.”

Speak what you will. Each glossolalium

sings. At lunch the maraschino cherry

in his fruit cocktail is a sweet magnet,

the orderly’s mop is mysterious silver,

and the slick of its wash across the floor

is something about the soul of a spoon.

Long hooves removed, sweat-stewed

and leather-redolent. Foot hovels, laces

cross-hatched up the fronts, tag ends untied,

orphaned parentheses, speechless tongues,

heels and soles rounded by miles. Black eggs

from which pale birds have emerged

that step-by-step had flown wingless through the world

in them. The pale intermediaries, the socks,

fat woolen blossoms reborn as buds

in the pure soil of waiting in the drawer, sheaths

to be entered for the entering of the shaft,

into the supple vamp, to be embraced by the welt,

swaddled in the gussets and bound there.

And bound also into the world, which accepts

the boots as the boots accept the feet,

earth which accepts the prints of the boots

as the boots accept the prints the feet leave in them,

miles of motion memorialized as stillness.

My hand, reaching inside each boot,

reads the history of my walking there,

which is nowhere and anywhere:

ten tentacles of pivot and balance;

the two balls of power; the arches, synecdoches

of a million steps; and the heels of transition

and restraint. Fossils of perambulation,

life-and-death masks of departure and return,

blunt destinationless etchings of boot memory.

These shed, heavy husks: years in them,

though they have no notion

of where they have been, and where,

with luck, they may yet take me.

As it would turn out, even under the weight of its considerable shell,

the snail ascended the wall of an enclosure made of razor blades

and slid across a battlement of seven honed edges on nothing

but its unmysterious, whisper-thin, moon-shimmer glister, a whisker

of which still sags in four of the six spaces between the blades

but sits like miniscule pearlescent and orbicular spittles atop

the glinty parapets themselves: see Figure 4, in which just the snail’s tail

can be seen as it descends into the bowl of garden greens and radicchio

that will be its reward. Figure 1 is also nice: the gelatinous horns

cresting the castle wall; but Figures 2 and 3 comprise the point of it all:

the little guy scudding over the awful edges like a schooner cresting

waves, the canvas of his burled shell aflicker, suggesting great speed.

Before he dreamed of being the tree

he dreamed of being the owl.

Before he dreamed of being the owl

he dreamed of being the flicker.

Before he dreamed of being the flicker

he dreamed of being the buck.

But the buck ran away, and the flicker

flew, and the owl scuttled sideways

out of sight, and all that was left

was the tree he dreamed of being,

so he dreamed of being the tree.

He was sifting the sunlight and the light

breeze swaying his needles just enough.

He welcomed the owl and said good-bye

to the flicker and the buck. He waved

hello to the breeze and good-bye to it too.

He let a bundle of brown needles fall

and considered the man asleep at his foot.

The clouds going by could not distinguish him

from his brethren, and the ants

leaving his skin to wander the man’s

could not distinguish the man from him,

but for maybe the warmth he also felt

enter him from the man’s bark,

which was of a color much like his own.

He concluded that warmth was the by-product

of sleep, and he dreamed he was the man

asleep at his foot, dreaming of the buck,

and then the flicker, and then the owl,

before he remembered he was the tree,

dreaming of being the man, asleep,

dreaming of being the tree, dreaming.

Next door the old pipe organ no longer wheezes.

Here, the new one’s electric and hums.

Here, too, upholstered pews, a last-twice-as-long-as-Jesus

miracle fabric called Herculon, over foam the bums

of bums will appreciate. And me, sixteen,

sneaking out, faking a coughing spell,

and bound for the old church next door, alone,

but only for a while, I hope. The girl

I’m meeting there is named Babette, known as Butch.

Every Sunday for a month we’ve met there,

in the choir loft. She’ll undress and let me watch,

and then we’ll desanctify the place—the pews, the air,

the ashtray a former organist abandoned.

Afterward I’ll light my Kool with hers.

The stained-glass window will be shot with sun

this morning and give our skins a special shimmer.

I almost believe I made this happen by praying,

every Sunday for half a year, alone and morose,

coming here and staying

until the doxology. Butch is pretty without her clothes.

If it is God from whom all blessings flow,

then what I’ve learned in the choir loft is faith.

Yes, she’s there, and already naked by the time I show.

Holy, holy, holy
, with her angelic mouth, she saith.

The winter snow broke his arms.

He’d lost his hat and his head,

and I needed to rebuild him from

the mud up, and so unzipped his fly,

and there they were: a family

of mice nested in the crotch

of the pants that had once been mine,

a squirm of pink pods, two

of which tumbled out and down

onto the spring-warm ground

at our feet, and which I collected

and slipped carefully back in.

Then I zipped the fly again

and waited until today, a month

later in spring, the once fresh

bale of straw having sprouted green.

And yes, they’re gone now,

all but the one whose foot it seemed

I’d caught, pulling the zipper up,

dun as a dry bean, mummified

in the sepulchre of my former pants.

I leave the fly closed this time,

and the mouse carcass breaks loose

and vanishes down a leg

as I jam more and more straw

down the waist hole to rebuild him,

the scarecrow I used to call Steve,

a name my wife, back in the years

of our courtship, had bestowed upon

that flesh of mine that had once

lived also in those parts of those pants.

Steve loved Diane in those days.

Now there’s a spiffy belt of red

baling twine, a farmerly blue work shirt,

and somewhere down around his ankle

a spot of gone meat, like a tumor

or a lost, desiccate, misbegotten testicle

I hope the ants will feast upon.

This spring I give him a face as well,

a Halloween mask of my son’s

from a few years back—a radio talk-show

blabbermouth—topped by the two-foot

conical dunce cap of a highway hazard

marker. Call it a cautionary tale, then:

seemingly happy in my pants, with a plastic face,

brainless, unable to dance, left arm

raised in a fist of straw, blessedly silent,

the scarecrow, nutless, with his new name.

—Anne Sexton

Having licked the birdbath dry, the moose lies down

on the path to the front door:
Alces alces phlegmatica
.

Photographable through the kitchen window, he cranes

his broad neck westward for a nibble of autumn’s wild strawberry

leaves. He won’t leave until he’s ready, and he’s not.

I am, I have been made to know, too interested in him.

He’s not an idea but a thing that shits thoughtlessly

and in prodigious abundance wherever he wants, and he wants

this morning, despite the dog’s incessant barking—not at the sight

of him but at his half-ton scent—to rest. Therefore he rests.

And therefore I, sequestered by his rest, rest myself

in the bastion of my measly consequence, a consequence

of his immensity, his territorial instinct, and his thirst.

For every evening, on this, the dry side of the mountain,

I fill the birdbath, and every morning he drinks it dry.

Maybe what interests me is less moose than bird, a nuthatch

that landed on the rim of the bath as he lapped,

and drank its fill as well, flying away only

when he lifted his massive muzzle and inclined his deep

black sniffers its way, meaning, it seemed, no harm.

I have seen the disembowelments of the peaceable kingdom.

I’ve sawn a moose rack from the winter-killed head of one of his kind,

having scared off a pack of coyotes in the process.

I’ve rescued a nuthatch from the jaws of my own cat,

and now I’m imprisoned in my house by the presence of a moose.

Though not for long. He’s rising, unwinding his long legs

and standing, stretching, shitting a peck of steaming bales.

The bowl of the birdbath is dry but cool, I suppose,

so he licks at it again, as though it is the blue itself

he means to consume, or the rime of its mineral deposits.

I cannot imagine, I confess, being uninterested in him.

His dewlap sways, he twitches his side-skin at an itch,

he heaves a gigantic breath and begins to move away,

and it may be he is no blessing upon me. It may be

there is no reason to speak of him at all.

The two-fingered sweep method works best,

brushing aside the needle thatch and duff

and exposing in the process more needle thatch

and duff. Although needle thatch and duff

sounds like a firm of British barristers,

and I am pleased already with my digging.

Like me, the ground here is undisturbed,

just as most memories are. Remembering nothing

I ever wrote or drew, I remember nevertheless

the flush of seeming wealth a Big Chief tablet

gave me: virginal; bold, broad lines and page-wide,

hyphenated intermediary ones the humps

of aitches and kickstands of arrs nudged against

and slanted from. Nary a thing to say nor a thought

to render unto ideaness, though: the expanse of the page

was a taunt this swath of nest-makings resembles

not at all. First of all, there are these calcite knuckles

of snails I uncover, little whorls aspiring to fossils.

Then a bone sliver, a tooth. In truth, such treasures

are everywhere, for soil is bone as much as bone is.

Here’s a speckled fleck of eggshell and a diminutive knot

of pine resembling the profile of a failed president.

Here’s a feather tip stiff as a beached fin.

Here’s a button I’ll take home and add to the box.

(In the households of the wealthy, do such boxes

exist? Admirals’ brass, ambassadorial pearl?)

It was white once, this one. Now it’s the color

of tea with cream. But wait. Here’s another,

a deeper brown but otherwise identical. There’s a story

here: she took the plackets and flung them wide,

Amanda, the beautiful daughter of the mountain recluse,

having her way with Pete, the mule skinner;

or maybe it was Clifton, chasing a wounded buck,

his right sleeve hung on a stob as he ripped them free.

No, wait: I’m missing Amanda. But then, here’s

the gleaming black toe from a deer’s hoof, then at last

a pale, translucent root the color of semen

and hairless as a worm, which, the mind wandering

as it does at such an enterprise, I begin to unearth

as carefully as an archaeologist uncovers a mandible.

It stretches, at a more or less constant depth

of six inches, almost the length of my leg

to a bulbous, pithy, empurpled tumor

the size of a softball, from which a single stem

rises to the withered, desiccate blossom of a trillium.

It’s a root gall, a mass of scar tissue become

the individual itself, little pine forest Ahab face

wounded into being but bearing into the world

nevertheless its flower. And here’s the click

of the black beetle crawling from under it,

wondering what’s become of his roof,

and there’s the clang of the triangle my wife uses

to call me back from wherever it is I’ve gotten to,

as per our arrangement: that I might return

from my daily quest and reload the wood crib

or sweep the spring-fallen pine needles

from the porch, that I might become a productive man

again, and not the sort who moseys through the woods

or sits on his ass, probing the ground for nothing,

although the buttons and the tooth are just what I need.