Food for the fat is like air. It fills you up
and lifts you out of the chair where otherwise
you sit like a dead seal.

That old scene—monkey see and monkey do—
is done. That organizing grind, the grid,
is barred. Guerilla movements must exclude

We were too late to catch the moon,
already hauled from the swamp
and hung up to dry. Moon melon,

After long hours of mindless labor,
yoked with debt, they are released like oxen

to graze in the remnant grass of another day.

Nothing about the food, the wine, the subjects
Of that night’s passions. Nothing even about
The weather—rain most likely, the damp seeping

Look out! my nightmare shouted,
as she crashed across the porch, flailing the shadows with a crutch.
Dark wind blew a storm of dust, or feathers, and lightning

I telescope you out to the farsighted wrong
end of the instrument

What makes Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
so hard to put down is his wild branching rhetoric.
It’s not enough to trace pathologies of mind, whatever

Among the birches
ears scooped the rustle.

Bridle and martingale,
the crupper’s strap and buckle,