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

Black coffee for Amanda,
sipping the white steam—Jessica says
                 we have to

The man is ripping through the brambles. He is
lost, tangled. He seems beside himself with grief.

my neighbors
say, when what they mean
        are deer—the foragers, the few at a time, fair

Those who think only of weakness and pain,
   if they bothered to come here at all,
failed to hear in that homemade salpinx

lit like a field of deplorable ice
then plunged back into their own birdlessness.

Thirty drops in a warm tumbler of lemonade
flood, for now, a cavern the Speedwell ripped open.
Three nights his dreams glisten with constellations.

and I wander around on the ceiling
in my funeral clothes among the gaudy
mushrooms of lightbulbs until I am struck

As for disappointments she’s had her share,
joining now with the horizon’s grief

Lemnos, you harbor me, moon-mountained
   and reticent, motionless in flux.
Dusk festers too long in the distance,