Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems

ANATOMY

OF

MELANCHOLY

AND OTHER POEMS

ALSO BY ROBERT WRIGLEY

Beautiful Country

Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems

Lives of the Animals

Reign of Snakes

In the Bank of Beautiful Sins

What My Father Believed

Moon in a Mason Jar

The Sinking of Clay City

ANATOMY

OF

MELANCHOLY

AND OTHER POEMS

ROBERT WRIGLEY

PENGUIN POETS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in Penguin Books 2013

Copyright © Robert Wrigley, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Pages 109
–110
constitute an extension of this copyright page.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Wrigley, Robert, 1951–

[Poems. Selections]

Anatomy of melancholy and other poems / Robert Wrigley.

pages cm

Poems.

ISBN: 978-1-101-59263-2

I. Title.

PS3573.R58A83 2013

811’.54—dc23

2012038722

Designed by Ginger Legato

The author would like to express his gratitude to the Bogliasco Foundation, for a residency in the spring of 2011, at the Liguria Study Center, in Bogliasco, Italy, where a number of these poems were written.

for Robert Coker Johnson

“This
Melancholy
of which we are to treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, not errant, but fixed: and as it was long increasing, so, now being (pleasant or painful) grown to a habit, it will hardly be removed.”

—Burton

“Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality.”

—Burton

“If any man except against the matter or manner of treating of this my subject, and will demand a reason of it, I can allege more than one; I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.”

—Burton

“A nightingale dies for shame if another bird sings better.”

—Burton

“So be it, then. It isn’t all that bad.”

—Szymborska

PART ONE

IN THE WHORL OF THE EAR OF ONE

Scarred by a long-gone buck’s rubbing,

shoved westward by his develveting grind,

the aspen had always leaned, and I had thought

many times I should stake it up, straighten it out,

but I never did. Then last week’s several heavy

feet of snow became rain, and under that weight it split

at the buck’s scar and bent to the ground,

and I was bereft. But in my regret I hauled

through the snow a hundred feet of ropes,

a come-along, a pair of steel pintle hooks,

and a five-gallon bucket of hopeful arborist’s

paraphernalia. I tied it off to a stouter tree,

winched it upright again, braced it with a two-by-four

plank notched and swaddled at the notched end

in inner tube ribbons, then guyed it off to the fir

that was the engine of its reascension.

Afterward I plastered black tar around its wound,

wound a bandage of grafting tape over the tar,

and covered the tape in a green vinyl sleeve

against the winter yet to come. And every day,

in order to offer such apologies as I can,

I visit it. Sometimes, like the other day, I sit with it,

put an arm around it, and describe the motions

of its leaves in spring and summer,

and especially in its glorious fall:

how its gold shimmers, and how sometimes

a leaf will loose itself and fly the ten yards

to the porch of my shack and settle on a chair,

or in the cold October rains plaster itself

to a window like a kiss. That day I also explained

the next step in our treatment. How once

it is leafed out and green again, I will,

using the same rope that righted it, fasten

that rope at the height of my knee, at the strong

unbroken butt of it just below the buck’s black scar,

and winch it a bit more upright yet, until,

by high summer, as straight as nearly any tree

around it, it will stand. Soon the seat of my pants

was wet from the snow and I was shivering,

but still I didn’t want to go. I stood

and stroked the dressing around its wound

and resolved to come back from my shack

that afternoon, to read it a poem or two—

not my own, certainly not this one, but maybe

“The Wellfleet Whale” or “The Trees,”

in which “their greenness is a kind of grief”—

though I have not done so yet. “Begin afresh,”

I think this afternoon. “Last year is dead.”

Larkin, I think, would have thought me a fool;

Kunitz, maybe not so much. Though I noticed,

in the divot where I’d sat beside it, a puddle

my own face regarded me from. I was empty-handed

and knew neither poem, the long nor the short,

by heart. Only the end of the Kunitz:

“Like us,” it goes, “disgraced and mortal,”

from the puddle, said my face.