Free Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems by Robert Wrigley Page A

white body of the earth.

CENOTAPH
    Never especially inclined mathematically, my father,
    days past his eightieth birthday, calculated the following:
    if the names of all the dead, military and civilian alike,
    of every nationality, from his war—the good one—
    were blasted into granite, as were those of only
    the American soldiers who had perished in the bad one, mine,
    the resulting monument would be almost a mile long
    and a hundred feet deep. Setting aside the engineering challenges,
    he believed the greater problem was the names. Sixty million,
    he ciphered, though I don’t know how. His imagined monument,
    a project no greater than the interstate highway system
    or the dams across the nation’s rivers, could take decades
    to erect. No more than Rushmore or Crazy Horse.
    And yet who would have envisioned such a task?
    I remember how, the night of the first moon landing,
    he stood in his backyard in the heart of the heart of the country,
    straining through binoculars to see what could not be seen
    but was. Now ten years past his monumental calculations,
    the only numeral that matters to him is 2. We are not sure why.
    Perhaps because my sister and I are two. As are he
    and our mother, her failing eyes and gentle hands. And therefore
    “two” is the answer to every problem the young neurologist poses,
    a physician not much older than my own children,
    none of whom ever lived through something called the draft.
    My father does not know what year we are in or the name
    of our current president. Even the names of his grandchildren
    are lost to him sometimes, and if we were to ask
    that name by which he calls himself, we fear that, too,
    may be gone. He does not know, and probably never did,
    the word
cenotaph
, though the memorial he once imagined
    would have been just that, an empty tomb.
    Father, let me estimate the dead for you:
    it has been and will be everyone. Let us understand
    that mountains are—like plains and swamps,
    like rivers and oceans—death and life factories, forges from which
    come numberless souls, residents on a spinning blue cenotaph
    that without us has no name nor need of one.
    These were the dead of a single war, these the dead
    of the others. And here are those who died, as we say, in peace,
    some whose lives have faded within them until they are
    only the names and numbers they had been known by.
    And here is where they were, beneath a cyclical moon,
    which bears through the universe some footprints and a flag.

FRIENDLY FIRE
    Is it even possible not to dream,
    or not remember what one dreams of,
    all the while a loop of endless music
    going round and round in the mind? Last night,
    every time I woke, it was “Moonlight Serenade,”
    a song first recorded twelve years before
    my birth—two weeks before my father’s
    seventeenth birthday—then rereleased four years
    later, in 1943, the middle of his Navy stint,
    as a “V-Disc.”
V
for Victory, of course.
    All night long, the melody’s mild clarinets,
    muted trumpets in jazzy counterpoint.
    It did not come from nowhere, though,
    this Glenn Miller classic, a four/four fox-trot.
    I remember its red, white, and blue label,
    from the Special Services Division, Music
    Section of the War Department, a relic.
    For an hour last night, my wife and I lay in bed
    and spoke of our fathers. Hers, who’d said
    if she’d been among the protestors at Kent State
    she too would have deserved to be shot,
    and mine, who in a singular act of anger
    had broken a record I thought I loved.
    In what way is one shaped by such a thing?
    she wondered. Had anyone ever said to me
    anything like what her father said to her?
    And I told her no, although I thought of
    Fresh Cream
, the album mine had broken.
    I’d been trying to learn the Clapton solo
    on “I Feel Free,” sitting with my guitar
    before the speaker. I’d gone away, forgetting
    the record there, and came back just in time to see it
    shatter against a wall. They’re both love songs.
    In his, the