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

man sings to his beloved in the light
    of the moon; in mine, in the end, she is the sun.
    Now my father’s almost ninety. He wouldn’t remember
    having done such a thing, and I have no interest
    in reminding him. We were at war in 1967.
    He was just home from work. It is unclear
    which of us was more miserable in his life then.
    My mother promised she would buy me
    a new one. My father reclined in his chair
    to wait for dinner, before he dressed
    and left for his second job, selling cars.
    It is unclear if the money he made those nights
    was necessary, though I think his absence was.
    I did not think last night of his love for Glenn Miller.
    I was not aware as my wife and I drifted into sleep
    that “Moonlight Serenade” was loosed in my mind,
    though I recalled this morning it was there
    at each of my brief and sleepy awakenings.
    And as it was all night, so it has been all day.
    Clarinets and muted trumpets, managing
    to be both melancholy and Caucasianally cool.
    I remember he closed his eyes and seemed asleep
    in his chair. I remember my mother’s promise
    and the single proviso she extracted from me:
    that I say not a word of it over dinner.
    And so I seethed and said nothing else either,
    which must have made it, from her point of view,
    among the most successful and pleasant
    of our dinners in those days. She had left
    Glenn Miller spinning, the changer arm up,
    so that the song played again and again,
    as it has in my mind for fifteen continuous hours now,
    wordless through that day’s stewed beef heart
    and mashed potatoes, and through my lunch today as well—
    some yogurt and fruit, a handful of nuts,
    for now I am sixty, and while it is unclear
    if I have any interest in reaching the age my father is,
    I go on as though it were perfectly clear.
    In 1967, he’d begun the long fall from faith,
    believing never in God but somehow
    in the nation, while I’d been spared any sense
    of the holiness of either. Imagine an hour passed,
    dinner eaten, my father having showered
    and put on a tie, “Moonlight Serenade” still
    and now eternally going. My mother tosses
    a dish towel over her shoulder, and they dance
    a few steps around the kitchen. I can see them
    from the living room where I sulk and glare.
    It must have been that day, in the midst
    of rage and woundedness and fruitless stewing,
    that his song became so deeply etched in my memory.
    A moment ago I called it up from a computer file—
    no vinyl, no tape, no disc at all, another victory
    for technology, like virtual memory or unmanned drones—
    and it unrolled from the speakers exactly
    as I’ve been hearing it for a whole night and half a day,
    its now primitive recorded nature preserved
    almost perfectly, but for the absence of the needle’s hiss.
    In those days you either paid no attention to it
    or else never dreamed it would go away.
    If you are old enough to remember records—
    forty-fives, seventy-eights, and thirty-three LPs—
    you might also remember the ghost that lived
    at the gleaming ungrooved lip of them, the way,
    two or three seconds before the music began,
    you heard its first notes coming. No such ghost
    in the digital version, just the melody’s clarinets,
    the muted brass in counterpoint. What he said
    and what he did: did either ghost itself into being first,
    into place in his father’s mind? Did he know
    what he would say or do before he said or did it?
    It came into the world and could not be undone
    or unsaid, but was it unforgivable? Either from certainty
    or misery, in the end it does not matter. From Old
    Testament wrath or intolerable, petulant rage,
    it does not go away. One cannot make it not be,
    it was and it is. One can forget it with age
    and infirmity or take it to the grave unresolved.
    How fortunate for me, my father alive, and attached
    to this memory in a sidelong way to music.
    Last night’s moon was waning and invisible
    behind clouds, but still its light glowed
    through the bedroom window. No one ever