me,
less inquisitive or wry than perplexed now,
and I begin to understand we will never understand
each other. Even when I sit on the floor
and call her to me, she seems uncertain
but allows me to stroke her head and neck
and soothe her, as she also soothes me,
although soon I rise and go back to the book,
each of us, in our own ways, unhappy.
ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY
Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee
and informed the seven of us in his charge
his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man
he never knew, had been possessed,
as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor
and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also
that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother,
born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said,
along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair,
we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember.
As we should also always remember to call him
only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive,
and never, he warned, by his given nor surname,
least of all with the title “mister” attached,
which would remind him of that same most hated father
and plunge him therefore into a mood
he could not promise he would, he said, “behave
appropriately within.” Fortunately, our job,
unlike the social difficulties attached thereto,
was simple: collect the trash from the county’s back roads.
Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness,
this meant not only beer cans and bottles,
all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but also
the occasional condom too, as well as the festering
roadkill, fresh and ridden with maggotry,
or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar
with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed
into the bed of the township truck we ourselves
rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments
then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette.
Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloaded
our tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston,
sexton of the dump and the dump’s constant resident,
in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailer
we marveled at and strangely envied, since every inch
of wall we could see through the open door
was plastered with foldouts and pages
from every
Playboy
and nudie magazine
he had ever found among the wreckage there.
Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth.
Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known,
by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yards
of his hovel, that he never bathed. And once,
while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22
from beside his door and popped
with amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us,
then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out,
and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rack
to dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hide
coat we could see, come the fall, except for school.
As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathom
and Lucy had no use for. On the truck’s dash
all that summer Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
,
a tome he said he’d read already eleven times,
this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way,
it might have had to do with something like the gallery
Stump’s trailer contained, the first word of its title
meaning something to us, the last nothing at all.
There were things about men we might be
unable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky.
And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat,
fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shade
with Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats.
The town we came from was sinking into the emptiness
of a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it,
and rats were more common than hares
and universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed,
as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity—
the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenance
of rats the very earth offered up like a plague,
the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump,
whose name,
less inquisitive or wry than perplexed now,
and I begin to understand we will never understand
each other. Even when I sit on the floor
and call her to me, she seems uncertain
but allows me to stroke her head and neck
and soothe her, as she also soothes me,
although soon I rise and go back to the book,
each of us, in our own ways, unhappy.
ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY
Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee
and informed the seven of us in his charge
his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man
he never knew, had been possessed,
as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor
and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also
that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother,
born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said,
along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair,
we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember.
As we should also always remember to call him
only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive,
and never, he warned, by his given nor surname,
least of all with the title “mister” attached,
which would remind him of that same most hated father
and plunge him therefore into a mood
he could not promise he would, he said, “behave
appropriately within.” Fortunately, our job,
unlike the social difficulties attached thereto,
was simple: collect the trash from the county’s back roads.
Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness,
this meant not only beer cans and bottles,
all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but also
the occasional condom too, as well as the festering
roadkill, fresh and ridden with maggotry,
or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar
with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed
into the bed of the township truck we ourselves
rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments
then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette.
Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloaded
our tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston,
sexton of the dump and the dump’s constant resident,
in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailer
we marveled at and strangely envied, since every inch
of wall we could see through the open door
was plastered with foldouts and pages
from every
Playboy
and nudie magazine
he had ever found among the wreckage there.
Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth.
Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known,
by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yards
of his hovel, that he never bathed. And once,
while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22
from beside his door and popped
with amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us,
then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out,
and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rack
to dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hide
coat we could see, come the fall, except for school.
As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathom
and Lucy had no use for. On the truck’s dash
all that summer Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
,
a tome he said he’d read already eleven times,
this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way,
it might have had to do with something like the gallery
Stump’s trailer contained, the first word of its title
meaning something to us, the last nothing at all.
There were things about men we might be
unable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky.
And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat,
fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shade
with Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats.
The town we came from was sinking into the emptiness
of a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it,
and rats were more common than hares
and universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed,
as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity—
the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenance
of rats the very earth offered up like a plague,
the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump,
whose name,
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