Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems by Robert Wrigley

close your eyes in the name
    of attentiveness. In daylight,
    there are birds, and for some reason
    the wind too is always awake,
    delivering weather or dust.
    At night, you concentrate,
    your listening is enhanced,
    and sooner or later you will hear
    a scale of bark let loose from a tree
    or a needle tick from limb to limb
    on its enormous journey to the earth.
    And sometimes, having resumed
    your walk, you will stop at the top
    of the ridge above your house.
    Its window lights will illumine the ground
    around it, and you will listen again
    and hear the faint hum of it—
    the buzz of its lightbulbs, the industry
    of its clocks. And sometimes
    you will approach it as would a thief
    and peer through the windows,
    in order that you might covet,
    being part of the world’s greater silence,
    everything that is already yours.

CALENDAR
    I wish the month had one more day, or even two,
    or that, in truth, I might live it again, if only
    so that Lola might be with me a little while longer.
    Not that the month has been anything special
    in regards to her. Most of it I spent
    away, and even the time with her,
    in the light of her devastating, sultry gaze,
    the fabulous black teddy, the sheer pink
    negligee, the one visible garter snap,
    the black hose, the carmine garter belt itself,
    and the high-heeled pink mules, to say nothing
    of the way she is seated on the golden
    sheen of the love seat, or the way the right
    cup of the teddy creates the most perfect
    ripple of flesh at the side of the breast
    it lifts just enough to cast a slender shadow
    between it and the other one, nor even
    the way her left leg is tucked under the right
    thigh or the way she holds the heel of that mule
    in her right hand as though bracing herself
    against herself. Even in all this glory,
    the time I spent with her consisted of nothing
    more than the occasional glance
    until today. Tomorrow I’ll move on
    to the beauty of next month, which, like every one
    but this one, is nameless in a special way.
    Four weeks ago, Firebelle; tomorrow, A Warm Welcome.
    But today, dark already at four-thirty in the afternoon,
    a snowstorm blowing in, it is Wednesday,
    the thirtieth of Lola, 2011.

THE SCHOLAR
    We were to know we would never know
    as much about it as he did. He knew
    we didn’t care and believed his knowing
    was evidence. He was a scholar,
    a critic, a wielder of wit for it,
    its minutiae and mysteries,
    which for him were no mystery at all.
    Machinery, maybe. Cogs and pistons,
    the pinioned heart in the heat of it.
    Someone asked about love, the fool.
    Our backs ached. The sun was relentless.
    He leaned on his hoe as though
    it were a podium, drew a kerchief
    from his pocket and wiped his face.
    He pointed at the sky, where a hawk hovered,
    awaiting the mouse that would bolt
    from our work. One mouse was just
    like another, and we were more or less
    the same, except for what we’d never know,
    which we knew, even without his saying so.

ANNA KARENINA
    The inquisitive look on the dog’s face
    makes me happy, suggesting not only her intelligence
    but my own, for having such a intelligent dog
    in the first place. Although what it is
    she wonders about I do not know. Seated in my chair,
    a book in my lap, I looked up and there she was,
    regarding me, as though she wondered
    what this book from the library, so redolent
    of others like myself, might offer me
    that she herself could not. But now she seems
    less inquisitive than wry, as though the compendium
    of sense I find my way through, she, via the scents
    only she is capable of apprehending, knows. Perhaps
    someone shed a tear on a page I am yet to reach,
    someone freshly washed, although the robe
    she wore was not and gave traces of someone else,
    someone she, the weeping woman, also sensed
    in its folds, which the dog reads just as I read
    the words, at this point in the volume,
    not the sort anyone would cry over.
    Do you want out? I ask her, and walk to the door
    and open it. But she only looks up at