Melancholia

I weather the evenings,writing a field guide

To the forms of melancholy,

My pen a raven’s feather

Charged with noxious ink.


There is always another poem to befriend me.

A handful of sunflower seeds.

I find myself in a country like Tibet,

Supping purest blue from the sky’s skull-cup.


The philosopher’s disease has cursed my blood

Since the coils of adolescence.

A shapely ingenious spirochete.


There is no vaccination against it.

No proof against the woeful wanderings

Of a mind unsatisfied with itself.


Pianist,play the minor chords for me;

Stroke the twilight body of autumn

Like a lover hurt into praise and scorn.


Saturn’s cycles regulate my ill-starred days.

I need blood and warmth to counter the darkness.

Or maybe I should draw the square of Jupiter.


The discontented temper that drives me

Defines the human in these shadowed eyes.

Disposition or disorder? One can only surmise.


The disproportionate is my element,

Acedia and tristitia my monastic sins,

Prone as I am to witchcraft and wordcraft.


A dire star presides over the shore,

Dark ocean waves riding over the driftwood day

And loveliness in the changing light.


And so to dance a Finnish tango

Beneath the Northern Lights, without a smile

Or word,-only music, sorrow, truth.