Free Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems by Robert Wrigley

TRIAGE
    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.

BOVINITY
    The steer has found, among the mud
    and diminishing islands of snow,
    a cropped-off but less coagulate expanse
    where it can lie and sleep awhile.
    From where I watch, I can see
    the quiver of an ear, a hind hoof
    gently twitching, the ordinary mammalian
    evidence that it is dreaming. But of what?
    I wonder. Fields of tall grass forever?
    A hay crib Jesus dispensing infinite fodder?
    Or maybe not of food at all but the litheness
    of its cousins, the deer and the elk,
    those dreams that materialize each night,
    when it must merely doze in the darkness,
    vigilant, awaiting, once again, the light,
    so that it might, as it does now, dream.
    Though it may be in this way I diminish it.
    It may be the cowbird, just a moment ago
    having alighted on its broad neck, is Nyx,
    consort of Erebus; that it dreams the day
    is the night. Or perhaps the cowbird is no bird
    at all, but the dream, and the dream is flying.
    And what of me then? Even in its sleep
    it may be aware of the presence of the maker
    of fences, bringer of the gun, conjurer
    of the high-backed truck and the hunchbacked
    butcher, builder of the gut pile the ravens
    and magpies will celebrate, for as long
    as the furtive night dogs will allow, though now,
    in sun and full sleep, it fears not, as it lifts
    and pumps its enormous wings and soars
    over the vast brown and