Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (5 page)

It is the legend, regarding the hole at the Big Eddy

of the Clearwater River, that it be not bottomless

but a might-as-well-be warren of shelves, caves,

and chambers, lost and cast-off sand and silt makings

so churned by the river’s hydraulics that every depth-gauge

sinker has spun from it a wasted mile or two

of horizontal measurement that is never returned.

Which is why we have had to imagine,

these forty and more years after the incident, the three

witnesses now gone, how carefully

the doctor’s wife must have driven the Cadillac down

the boat ramp and into the water, and how the car

strangely floated, turning slowly, sunk to the roofline,

until it vanished at what must have been the very mouth

of the myth of bottomlessness itself: one Coupe de Ville

Cadillac, 1963, yellow, windows according to witnesses

rolled up tight, and holding the driver, presumed to be

a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three children,

presumed also to have been inside. Such is the power

of plain police reportage, and also of the grappling hooks

that over the next week brought to the surface

twelve sunken logs and the carcass of a drowned moose,

before the search was abandoned and a service performed

on the beach there. Here is a black-and-white picture

of several hundred mourners. Late spring. The beach is pale sand,

and white shoes dangle from the fingers of several of the women.

From this angle, the highway roadbed looking down,

the river turns above the eddy like water in a drain.

Go down there now, in the turn of it, and see

the Cadillac descend among the many oscillating logs

untouched, scraping not the least outcropping and coming

at last to rest on an only slightly slanted shelf,

a right rear wheel over the edge and slowing

to a stop. By now the rubber window gaskets

will have disintegrated, and sometimes a sturgeon

longer than the Coupe de Ville itself

will slide its soft sucker mouth along a glassy seam

for no reason but the dim reminder of a soup

it sipped there once. Such is the power of memory,

which this is not. Not of the doctor’s yellow Cadillac, nor

of his beautiful wife behind the wheel and headed out of town.

She looked your way, but you did not see her see you at all.

Some thug or other was always vanishing.

East St. Louis, my father said. He always said that.

City of my birth. The new highway made it possible

to pass the place by, ill-lit, seemingly unpeopled.

He drove fast. The windows were down.

He’d let me extend the blade of my hand

into the wind of our going, and we were passing

a large trailer-truck loaded with crushed,

compacted cars—a recognizable Chevrolet emblem

on one, and from another, a slip of fabric,

headliner or upholstery, black and pointed

at its end, resembling, I remember, a necktie.

When a lesser species rises among them

to consume the sun immemorially theirs,

redwoods will sometimes let go a great limb

and crush the interloper where it stands,

implying intent and therefore what we know

as consciousness. It is theorized they may be able,

via their massive and elaborate root systems,

to command the groundwater itself, for the benefit

only of their kind—a government and fealty of trees.

Though perhaps what seems intentional

is simply part of the balance they exemplify,

the fallen limb afflicted by a disruption

in the nutrient flow precisely above where a hemlock

or pine has sprung forth, suggesting the decision

is no decision at all but simply cause and effect,

silvicultural machinery, as though it were not the mind

of a god but a body, reflexive to stimulus and wound,

actions neither revenge nor damnation nor self-preservation.

Although the darkness they rise from is their own creation,

and high in their canopies, lichens not found below,

delicate as fog, and birds that might as well be angels.

The language he speaks and writes is spoken

and written by no one but him, which solves,

for him at least, the problem of audience.

Unless somehow, against the odds, he believes

there is someone to whom his alphabet speaks,

and his words—if they are words and not notes

of some other sort of singing, a system of clicks

and impossible vowels, the strange habitats

in which his bent and prickly syllables live.

The patience with which he clears his throat

and nods to us and begins, mild and tentative

at first, to read, or sing, or ceremonially recite

the epic of his people or the story of his God

or the description of his lost beloved’s body,

moves us so each time, we concentrate and nod

but understand nothing at all of what he

has said. When he’s finished, he looks at us

expectantly, and we, in our own inadequate tongues,

and often gesticulating wildly, discuss

the majesty of his accomplishment, which no one

fathoms any part of, least of all our praise,

if that’s what it is, since we too are the last

or perhaps the only ones ever to raise

into the air such utterances—from the past

or the future or from this very moment in time,

when no one knows what anyone means to say or tell,

not even at night, when we seem to pray, then recline

on our bunks, each in his own terrible, familiar cell,

with the toilet and the night-light, with the reams

of paper, filled and yet to be, that surround us,

and he goes on speaking through our dreams,

where everything, making sense, astounds us.

The umbrellas misfired, the rain broke down,

all the seed-white dandelions were bludgeoned

to a fluffy paste. The bell tower ratcheted

up its terrible black birds. Negotiations

broke out between thunder and cell phones

despite the enormous vee of geese going by.

Someone whispered the secret of the match

to a cigarette, and hail commenced

machine-gunning a delicate wing of smoke.

Cruel world for bathing beauties, though. The clatter

of flip-flops rose like an ovation for the nation

of May, and the Goth boy in his black greatcoat

pale as the Jesus over Rio and similarly stanced,

having raised his arms and brought to the air

not only the wail of the noon whistle

but also the howl of a hound dog leashed to a hydrant,

as though it, in the midst of such majesty,

in the last week of classes, were his wolf.

PART THREE

DARK BLUE MOUTH

He could not, he insisted, take his eyes

from the pistol’s muzzle, calculating

as he watched it, from the way it quivered—

and cocked, as it was, a single action,

it seemed—how easily that quivering

could cause it, without the man’s intending,

to discharge, as we say, and thinking too,

given its angle, what part of him would,

in that event, be thus sundered and torn.

Although, this was after the fact, later,

as he explained to the two policemen,

how he kept his left hand in front of him,

as though he might catch the slug, or block it,

even as he reached slowly behind him

and produced, with thumb and index finger,

the wallet he dropped mildly between them

and stepped back from as the mugger stepped forward

and bent to retrieve it.

               Only then

did he see not the pistol, but the tattoo

of the birds on the other’s left forearm.

Sundered and torn, he’d said. Those were his words,

though the policeman writing it all down

did not write it all down that way, except

for the tattoo, its three colorful birds

and the leafy gray branch they perched upon.

Birds, he’d said, American goldfinches,

of the sort that winter in the canyons

east and south of the city, and which sing,

canary-like,
ti-dee-di-di
, sweetly,

and gather in flocks on winter mornings,

bobbing on the limbs of leafless birches,

to feed on the last dry catkins and fly

all at once, as one, with a single mind,

or none, startled by nothing, or by some move

nothing but one or all the birds could see.

Almost exactly life-size, and well done,

artistically, even, in the dim lights

of that backstreet he’d walked a thousand times.

Nicely rendered songbirds, he’d said, which were

how it was the culprit would be, as we say,

so easily apprehended, strung out,

asleep in an aging junker Plymouth

in the city’s best park, the pistol snugged,

the newspaper reported, “like a teddy bear,

directly under the suspect’s chin,

the victim’s wallet still in his pocket.”

It also spoke of the tattoo only

in the most general terms, as that which,

being the classic identifying mark,

along with the wallet, would convict him.

Still, thereafter, he, the victim, always

described the goldfinches in great detail,

feeling, as he’d come to, that it was they

who might well have saved him, remembering

how slowly he’d moved, so as not to startle

the birds outside his window, and not

to have to keep seeing, neither in memory

nor dream, the dark blue mouth of the pistol.

In fact, it’s a beautiful thing: expertly made,

the egg of lead in the business end

and the flexible leather braid

leading to a bulb for the hand

and the loop for the jacker’s wrist,

kinetic energy far superior to a fist’s.

It is also perfect for holding a book

open to a certain page or passage.

How it feels about such work,

we cannot know but can imagine,

being men and wondering, after all—

the thud and crumple, the fall.

In the palm of my left hand, I slap it; then

he, in his right, my left-handed, bookish friend.

He loves how cold she always is. Even sandwiched

in their matched, fully-zipped-together sleeping bags,

she presses herself to his back, chilled tomato to the ham of him.

It’s August, but the river runs an arm’s length below them,

runs her height from them southwest, and it is cold, colder

than she is, though here is where she loves to sleep,

inside the almost-kiss of it, the river’s endless consumption

of stones, its long nightly respirations risen into veils,

into vapor tatters a morning sun unwinds and licks away.

This is how it must be: her front sufficiently warmed, she turns

and he must also turn, the spoon of meat he is all night, and hot,

a film of almost-sweat across him like a condiment

she cannot get enough of. He is rich, he thinks. He is taste

and succulence. He is delicious. And if one bench of floodplain

farther up and away from where they lie would be warmer,

still he knows it would be too far, for her, from what she loves

as much as she loves his hands and chest, his salt-skin shoulders

and his breath: this river she cannot live without

for long. He does not mind such faithlessness as that.

She would be the trout she loves as much as she loves him,

so therefore he lives alongside the water, breathing with her also,

and when the sun at last clears the eastern ridge

and the dew from the tent’s dome, like the river’s mists,

is swallowed by the air, he like the mist rises,

pared away from her, and builds her

a small morning fire, and fires the water for coffee,

and is allowed, as the most modest recompense, to stand

and watch through the sliver of vent at the top of the tent door

as she rises too, bare and half warm, to dress again

for the day—the chilled breasts and backside

submerged inside her clothes as the trout is

in the river—for though he also loves the trout

and will be all the sun long troubled

by the difficulty of the lure, the fly, the hook that holds

inside what appetite any of them might imagine,

still he knows, come night, come the water’s icy vapors

upward, that he will hold her as he might, lucky under the moon

and near the trout—its beautiful meat and bone, its edible skin—

where they sleep, on the round of the river’s cold lip.