Melencolia

by Clark Coolidge

Published in a limited edition of 1000.

Genres: Poetry

24 pages, Chapbook

First published October 1, 1979

About the author

Coolidge attended Brown University, where his father taught in the music department. After moving to New York City in the early 1960s, Coolidge cultivated links with Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. Often associated with the Language School his experience as a jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac and movies, Coolidge often finds correspondence in his work. Coolidge grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and has lived, among other places, in Manhattan, Cambridge (MA), San Francisco, Rome (Italy), and the Berkshire Hills. He currently lives in Petaluma, California.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

MELENCOLIA

A great block of wedge wood stint
stays at the star of its corner which.
A divider in pierces depends, wans.
For is what I have made be only salvage?
Sat in my robes, folds. Decomposed, fled.
The world a height now brine, estuaries drained to the very pole.
Geometrics, a lingual dent? Drainage, albany. Where at the last
stand all this sphere that herded me? My cell a corner on the
filtering world, all out there herein my belts. Things in trim they
belt me, beg me, array my coined veils. Brass, corpse of my trends
to needless never suffered their pricks. The world in anger
is an angled hole? Drop my pliers, sit hemmed in, which have made
has clad me in. Meld thought as is droop. But the classed
claustrophobe as is mold of engines, their great cupboard strikes.
How many facets to the pear in mind? All uneaten what will rest?
Will it cog to the lagoon of black dust all clogs? My clothes
a bitumen in semblances, back of the sphere is a dome. Pends,
draping what thought to be, hung dwindles in apparence height storm
off sauce crystal in pickles. These ledges of the lids are calipers,
wrought off standard and coiling valise. I have brought down the
world in a cloistering pelt. It maketh wedge, to all the sameness
joints a bridge. What choice of thing for silence, sheer of
point and unencroached of plot. Onions are dim till the lights 
in the ice surround are trimmed. A mind mine to bare but till dust
all is lodged. There are no lights in absolute thing? This room
the brain of beveled thinks. Rock spall till it gain meat heights?
A rim of stench, name of things till it eat away in twining fade,
all go gold in the flats of drop. An andiron, a hand urging.
A monad, a pleistocene of gum. A crystal, third foot to each
standing man of quietest thought. A knuckle, brass and wheat wrap
of stillness. A quoit and no plating sky of semblance. Quick-freeze
python, brim raider, elephant standard, notch of whelm quease,
fronds of forks the coin of needles await and wearing brine moon
to quietest frieze the disc. House not to live but collect the
magnet fronds. My hands not to measure with they throw.
Do they see the amber will not allow but a scan to escape but
alleys the arch of dusk a mat to play and in rubber prevent all
musk and larded the stupors stand at. Musculant starers boil me
ledge and encase the crisp but mum. The rose is a jape of stone.
The animals follow to honor the sediments. I emboss when I pen but still
they escape. I lie in my cell and draw all wheat from the marrows
are a stone. The birds fly from ringing on their axes, a whole sphere
from their tones. The crash as a whole, things in their rates
mounting strains and piping extents of char and chased in tune.
My wrist here stands for a brace of coffee, I lie it all out to be.
For my lies of bronze will be stone. My laps stint of coldest
collide the shards brim to in furthest flung design. My arm
strands plumb to the deepest well, for what are eyes. Eyes for
which whelms bend what in reachest stare. Eyes are oakness, eyes
are must, pierce in sleep, lag in ironing the pig iron pierced.
The meteoric, the thrashed in fieries, the bleated rug, the mission
pipe. Stubbed in matrix the we does not see the stuns itself
coiled and revolving they make pole of solid dome. I will laugh
at my polygonal shoes, but not now they are wastes. I will trim my
dome from walls of gut iron. Little beveled cornice irons strapped
in their tumbling ring so well I shout I might. Chair, be newel
and anoint my back. Sled of butters, stack these hills. Polecat
shunt. The lion will lie at the foot of my table I array my brains
in a lie to draw. The fluids defeat and they ring. I arrange such
measly to what mere foot of the slotting heights. And what stares back in the rings I may sound. All my things scattered in the rinse of a lamp they are hoarded feeble. I list and weak display my
seeming part strongs, iron lemons, painted burning skulls mathematic
tip, a metal was a jelly to my thought raided past, ruler long
stunned. Whose names throttle this cupboard but are mine? A stirring
wends its apple way, its birdy throat, its muscles roar from wood
stung strain and cellish hung. Arranged, stuck-hinged, the plutonists
deny, the hailers of planet as a poorboy shrubb. I have stopped them
all a moment in my sad, my plaited noun a cramp so dense the 
climbing worms will nor worry it. Seal my death here. Sky shrunk
to a pin no rolling voids in a boil will scout. Light stay enough
to dim my scowl, my thing to congeal no collision no array but edge in grace.



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