American Melancholy Read online

  moving from west to east effortless above the pines

  In this New Jersey smudged air. In March 1963

  the final stroke. “Died in his sleep.” Eyes

  moving restlessly down the naked body.

  On a gurney? Since when? The shock of it, his young

  male body restored. Svelte dark down of the chest,

  groin and soft stirring penis. Winter-pale

  haunches, muscles hard as bone. Lifts

  his head. Where? Christ, he’s alert, he’s curious—

  God-damned ready to begin it all again—

  This is the time for which we have been waiting.

  Note: The letter from William Carlos Williams to his friend and editor James Laughlin was written sometime shortly prior to June 1962, when Williams’s last book, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, was published.

  The Tunnel

  Early April, descending

  the long broken hill

  behind Panoramic Way.

  Morning radioactive-bright.

  The hill a puzzle of concrete outcroppings

  broken and discontinuous as the aphorisms of Nietzsche.

  And the Tunnel not (yet) visible

  though its peristalsis begins

  to pull, squeeze, tug.

  In the dazzling distance,

  San Francisco Bay.

  As you descend the hill

  the glittering Bay retreats

  like a memory of happiness

  but still

  the palette is wide, seemingly random

  in sunshine like spangled coins

  the curious uneven descent

  like a drunk

  staggering

  and the Tunnel not (yet)

  defined as in a canvas

  of Magritte where it’s the absence of

  depth that assures

  This is art, not life.

  This will not hurt you.

  And now passing

  the abandoned house

  gigantic, stucco

  strangely surrounded by chain-link fencing,

  razor wire absurd in swagger

  protecting what no one wants.

  And still you descend the hill

  bravely, boldly

  blindly seeing now

  the deserted playing field,

  deserted playground.

  Stilled swings, rusted slide

  O where has life gone?—

  abandoning these places

  abruptly at Warring Street,

  and then to Derby

  more rapidly now

  the Tunnel narrows

  at Stuart, College, Russell too

  swiftly passing way-stations

  of ordinary life

  you would clutch at, in

  your descent

  except sucked by peristalsis

  tugged past, breathless

  and now the sky lowered

  like a sound-proofed ceiling

  unremitting, no mercy

  at Ashby Avenue

  rudely tugged as a teat

  made to turn right onto Ashby,

  as the morning shudders

  visibly, you can feel shrinkage

  as out of pastel treetops

  the Hospital emerges

  grim in efficiency

  the “boundless” sky

  has vanished, at the Hospital

  driveway in the grip

  of peristalsis tugged

  through the automatic doors

  in whose glass a frightened face

  appears, disappears

  and into the twilit foyer

  and to the double elevators

  rising inexorably to the sixth floor

  to room 765

  where your life awaits you

  sleeping, a tube in his bruised nose

  clasped hands on the distended belly

  breathing in random gusts

  like the lone wind at shore,

  and a sickle moon above.

  O Love—where will you abide when our frail bodies are no more?

  Palliative

  1.

  Hate hope!

  Arsenic for weeks

  we’d taken in micro-drops

  on credulous tongues.

  Hope the thing

  with noisome wings

  clattering

  about our heads

  with a broom at last swatted to earth.

  Stomped, smashed.

  Now, clarity of silence.

  Only the drip of minimal liquids—saline, Dilaudid.

  Only the labored and arrhythmic breathing

  as the chest rises, falls—rises,

  falls.

  Faintest of echoes—Give up on.

  2.

  Hold desperation

  like a playing card

  close to the heart

  reluctant to reveal

  what you feel

  but (yes) you risk

  the irrevocable loss

  too late.

  And so on the brink of too late

  (when no one else is in the room)

  (for a hospice room can be crowded)

  (by “crowded” meaning more than two people)

  you tell your husband that you love him

  so much, what a wonderful

  husband he has been

  and he says—But I failed you by dying.

  And you protest—But why are you saying

  such a thing, you are not

  dying, we are talking

  Here together!—

  And he says Because I am dead.

  As after the final biopsy

  he’d been incensed—They took my soul from me.

  They took me to the crematorium, I saw the sign.

  Don’t try to tell me I didn’t see the sign.

  3.

  Trapped in this bed like a prison.

  Is the car out front? Drive the car around.

  Where are the keys to the car?

  Joyce, don’t leave. Joyce?

  We need to get the car. Where are the keys . . .

  I want to go home. Take me home. Joyce—

  don’t leave me!

  What did we do with the car?

  4.

  In hospice time ceases.

  Hours lapse into days

  and days into night

  and again day, and

  night and the mouth

  once fierce in kissing

  and being kissed

  is slack, mute.

  And breathing slows,

  asymmetrical

  as a listing boat.

  And fever dreams rage

  beneath bluish eyelids

  quivering in secret life.

  Until at last the deepest sigh

  of a lifetime . . .

  5.

  After such struggle

  you must love

  the unrippled dark

  water in which

  the perfect cold O

  of the moon floats

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to my poet-friends Henri Cole and the late C. K. Williams for having read many of these poems in manuscript, and for their overall generosity and encouragement; and to my dear late husband Charlie Gross for his hope that I would gather the poems into a volume.

  Much gratitude and thanks are also due to the editors of those magazines in which most of these poems appeared, which include New Yorker (“Harlow’s Monkeys”; “In Hemp-Woven Hammocks Reading the Nation,” under the title, “This Is the Season”; “Edward Hopper’s ‘Eleven A.M.,’ 1926”; “Too Young to Marry but Not Too Young to Die”; “Jubilate: An Homage in Catterel Verse” (New Yorker online); New York Review of Books (“Exsanguination,” “Loney”); Poetry (“Little Albert, 1920,” “The Coming Storm,” “The First Room,” “Sinkholes,” “That Other,” “The Blessing,” “American Sign Language”); Atlantic (“Apocalypso”); Salmagundi (“Hometown”; “To Marlon Brand
o in Hell,” “Old America Has Come Home to Die,” “The Tunnel,” “Palliative”); Paris Review (“The Mercy,” “Harvesting Skin”); Boulevard (“Doctor Help Me”); New Republic (“Hatefugue”); Kenyon Review (“Bloodline, Elegy”); Yale Review (“A Dream of Stopped-Up Drains”).

  “Kite Poem” was included by Robert Pinsky in a Slate (online) poetry project (2003) and “This Is the Time for Which We Have Been Waiting” was included in Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired By the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams, ed. Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro (2011). “To Marlon Brando in Hell” was included in The Best American Poetry 2017, ed. Natasha Trethewey and David Lehman.

  Photo credit: Charlie Gross, Lake George, 2018.

  About the Author

  JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has several times been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Joyce Carol Oates

  Women in Love and Other Poems (1968)

  Anonymous Sins and Other Poems (1969)

  Love and Its Derangements (1970)

  Angel Fire (1973)

  Dreaming America (1973)

  The Fabulous Beasts (1975)

  Season of Peril (1977)

  Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (1978)

  Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982 (1982)

  The Time Traveler (1989)

  Tenderness (1996)

  Copyright

  AMERICAN MELANCHOLY. Copyright © 2021 by Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  FIRST EDITION

  Cover design by Allison Saltzman

  Cover photograph by Charlie Gross

  Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-303528-7

  Version 01142021

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-303526-3

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  *“Catterel”—an elevated variant of “doggerel.”