Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (8 page)

We were to know we would never know

as much about it as he did. He knew

we didn’t care and believed his knowing

was evidence. He was a scholar,

a critic, a wielder of wit for it,

its minutiae and mysteries,

which for him were no mystery at all.

Machinery, maybe. Cogs and pistons,

the pinioned heart in the heat of it.

Someone asked about love, the fool.

Our backs ached. The sun was relentless.

He leaned on his hoe as though

it were a podium, drew a kerchief

from his pocket and wiped his face.

He pointed at the sky, where a hawk hovered,

awaiting the mouse that would bolt

from our work. One mouse was just

like another, and we were more or less

the same, except for what we’d never know,

which we knew, even without his saying so.

The inquisitive look on the dog’s face

makes me happy, suggesting not only her intelligence

but my own, for having such a intelligent dog

in the first place. Although what it is

she wonders about I do not know. Seated in my chair,

a book in my lap, I looked up and there she was,

regarding me, as though she wondered

what this book from the library, so redolent

of others like myself, might offer me

that she herself could not. But now she seems

less inquisitive than wry, as though the compendium

of sense I find my way through, she, via the scents

only she is capable of apprehending, knows. Perhaps

someone shed a tear on a page I am yet to reach,

someone freshly washed, although the robe

she wore was not and gave traces of someone else,

someone she, the weeping woman, also sensed

in its folds, which the dog reads just as I read

the words, at this point in the volume,

not the sort anyone would cry over.

Do you want out? I ask her, and walk to the door

and open it. But she only looks up at me,

less inquisitive or wry than perplexed now,

and I begin to understand we will never understand

each other. Even when I sit on the floor

and call her to me, she seems uncertain

but allows me to stroke her head and neck

and soothe her, as she also soothes me,

although soon I rise and go back to the book,

each of us, in our own ways, unhappy.

Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee

and informed the seven of us in his charge

his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man

he never knew, had been possessed,

as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor

and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also

that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother,

born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said,

along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair,

we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember.

As we should also always remember to call him

only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive,

and never, he warned, by his given nor surname,

least of all with the title “mister” attached,

which would remind him of that same most hated father

and plunge him therefore into a mood

he could not promise he would, he said, “behave

appropriately within.” Fortunately, our job,

unlike the social difficulties attached thereto,

was simple: collect the trash from the county’s back roads.

Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness,

this meant not only beer cans and bottles,

all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but also

the occasional condom too, as well as the festering

roadkill, fresh and ridden with maggotry,

or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar

with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed

into the bed of the township truck we ourselves

rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments

then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette.

Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloaded

our tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston,

sexton of the dump and the dump’s constant resident,

in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailer

we marveled at and strangely envied, since every inch

of wall we could see through the open door

was plastered with foldouts and pages

from every
Playboy
and nudie magazine

he had ever found among the wreckage there.

Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth.

Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known,

by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yards

of his hovel, that he never bathed. And once,

while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22

from beside his door and popped

with amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us,

then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out,

and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rack

to dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hide

coat we could see, come the fall, except for school.

As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathom

and Lucy had no use for. On the truck’s dash

all that summer Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
,

a tome he said he’d read already eleven times,

this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way,

it might have had to do with something like the gallery

Stump’s trailer contained, the first word of its title

meaning something to us, the last nothing at all.

There were things about men we might be

unable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky.

And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat,

fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shade

with Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats.

The town we came from was sinking into the emptiness

of a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it,

and rats were more common than hares

and universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed,

as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity—

the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenance

of rats the very earth offered up like a plague,

the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump,

whose name, as it was scrawled on his mailbox,

seemed to be Stumplin Reilly McCarriston, Esquire.

Of the seven of us, one would die in Vietnam;

one, after medical school, would hang himself

from a beam in his parents’ basement; the others

merely gone, vanished in actuality if not in memory.

Leaving me, alone, to tell this story. How Stump

would spend his last twenty years in prison,

having shot Lucy—one slender, flattening .22 slug

through the forehead—as he stood fifty feet away,

balanced atop the tub of an ancient wringer washer,

arms extended, like Jesus Christ, said Stump,

whose trailer was bulldozed into the dump itself

even before the trial, and who, no doubt, by some

court-appointed lawyer if not the appalled sheriff himself,

was forced to bathe and shave, to step into the unknown country

of a scentless white shirt and black businessman’s trousers,

in order to offer his only yet most sincere defense:

that Lucifer—Mr. Doolin, as the court insisted—had told him to.

Most beautiful aspen tree, I admire the way

a wound some buck grinding his horns

against your trunk has healed to a pale gray

that accentuates your beauty now, a decade later on.

And as today’s autumn storm undresses you leaf

by delicate gold leaf, I watch until you stand

utterly bare, as we say of your kind so unsheathed.

If I’d thought, as the storm began,

that you would be less lovely uncovered,

forgive me. What did I know, just a man

watching from a window, who, having observed

and studied a wet leaf plastered against the pane,

missed, among the hundred others whirling past

in the swirl and toss of the rain, the very last.