Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems Read Online Free PDF Page A

to myself that day, humility
    and all the humble pitfalls and perils of language
    and instruction. If there were a career in bathing
    and reporting the processes thereof, she was home free.
    And there were jobs, I did not doubt, that her paper,
    offered as a letter of application, might well land her,
    if only she sat across the desk from someone
    not at all like me and beamed the way she did,
    mostly in pride. I struck three semicolons,
    one of them used correctly but pointlessly.
    She leaned in very close; she was not pleased
    with her A-minus, but honestly thrilled.
    I realized I was hardly older than she was,
    but at the weekly meeting with my own colleagues
    I did not speak of her at all, nor of the ballplayer
    who’d threatened to break my nose if he did not pass,
    nor of the tree-crushed, almost quadriplegic former logger
    whose papers were transcribed by an amanuensis
    of nearly intolerable linguistic ignorance. This would be
    my life for some years. It was a way to live.
    The girl aimed to be a nurse and marry a doctor.
    The ballplayer went to the bigs and became
    a millionaire. The hired scribe left the logger
    in his motor-driven wheelchair on a dock by the river,
    to fish, and somehow the motor joystick was nudged
    just enough so that he tumbled in and drowned.
    The scribe, from the office of occupational rehabilitation,
    in an act supremely needless and disarming,
    brought the logger’s final paper to me
    and wept in my office like a baby.

LEGEND
    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.

MERCURY
    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