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

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.

BLACKJACK
    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.

DELICIOUS
    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