Joel Savishinsky

Mornings in Melancholia

–-after Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia”

I.
A strange country to walk into at ten A.M.
when the dark descends on photoshopped,
coffeeshopped bodies cantilevered over steam,

beans and screen. Practiced in the importance
of looking earnest, they have yet to master
the melancholy in their eyes, or re-patriate

the exiled brightening glance they left behind
at the borders of employment.

II.
Colonizing café tables, their comfort is
wrapped in poor posture and pale misery,
set to sipping on solitude. Pretending to see

no one but still carefully seen all the same,
discrete citizens and squatters admire one another,
speak a syntax of gestures laced with spaced sighs

and tongues laid on lips in a mime of thought.
Some days, I catch myself in the mirror of their eyes.

III.
This daily masque, as poised as a play on a stage,
side-lit in blue, stands dressed with brown-stained
saucers placed beside papers marked with

antiquarian, thin black ink. From the corners,
a trio of baristas, unguarded, unbarded,
recites the chorus, and we raise cups till

our fingers, bent by an angry light, uncurl and
cave to the city’s long day of rude demands.

Joel Savishinsky is a retired anthropologist and gerontologist. His books include The Ends of Time: Life and Work in A Nursing Home and Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, both of which won the Gerontological Society of America’s annual book prize. In 2023, The Poetry Box published his collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging. He lives in Seattle, helping to raise five grandchildren, and considers himself a recovering academic and unrepentant activist. savishin@gmail.com