Six lines, three couplets, and a whole failed romance told through dinner. Dave Bonta's poem gives us a speaker who cooks for a woman he admires and fears, and who guesses from the start that his offering won't be taken. The central idea is that unrequited desire is less a grand tragedy than a series of small, almost comic humiliations. Melancholy here arrives as a shrug and a joke.
The title sets the terms. "Anatomy" means taking a body apart to study it, and the word also recalls Robert Burton's enormous seventeenth-century book on melancholy. Bonta's version is six lines long, which is a joke in itself: the poem suggests that heartbreak, properly dissected, doesn't take much space. The first couplet makes an anatomical inspection of the woman. "Her physique is cut stone" is hard in every sense. The sharp *k* sound of "physique," the blunt monosyllables "cut" and "stone," and the finality of the line's last word all suggest a body that is sculpted, cold and unmovable. We see her only from outside, as an object. Then comes "a feast of disorders," a phrase that pulls two ways. A feast is abundance and welcome, while "disorders" sounds like a medical chart. She seems to be both overflowing and afflicted, and the word "feast" quietly introduces the food imagery that governs the rest of the poem.
The second couplet turns to the speaker, and the tone becomes deadpan. "I am a new cook" is endearingly modest, since he is inexperienced and nervous about feeding someone like her. The next line then swerves: "but will be nothing by morning." We expect "but I'll learn" or "but I'll try." Instead the "but" leads straight to self-erasure. The line can be read several ways. It might describe a single night that leaves no trace, or a lover swallowed up by the person he serves. The poem lets all of these stand. The time frame, from supper to morning, also gives the whole poem a night-long shape, as if we have watched an evening go wrong in fast-forward.
The final couplet pulls the two figures into one metaphor. "My heart must be / a missed supper in her diet." The words "must be" matter because the speaker doesn't know his heart is rejected. He deduces it, the way you might guess from a closed door that nobody is home. The line break leaves "must be" hanging for a beat before the image arrives, which gives the speaker's resignation a small physical pause. "Diet" fits the stone physique, since it implies regimen, discipline and control. Judging by this imagery, she is someone who denies herself, and his heart is one of the things she goes without. Notice too that the heart is the only organ the poem names, in a poem titled "Anatomy," and it ends up as an uneaten meal. The first stanza opens with "her" and the last line ends on "her diet," so she encloses him on both sides.
The form reinforces this. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and everything is lowercase except the lone capital "I," which looks small and exposed among the other words. The couplets are tidy, but the feeling inside them is not. Line lengths do some of the emotional work: the first couplet is short and heavy, while "but will be nothing by morning" stretches longer and trails off. The sounds soften as the poem goes on. The hard consonants of "cut stone" give way to the hissing *s* of "missed supper," which sounds almost like a sigh.
What makes the poem worth reading is its economy and its control of tone. It never begs, and it never explains its sadness. It takes one comic, domestic conceit, a cook and a woman who won't eat, and lets that carry the whole weight of longing. Its self-mockery is where the melancholy lives, because someone who can joke this lightly about being nothing by morning has clearly thought about it for a long time.