The following poems are
used with the permission of the authors. Copyright permissions from the publishers
are pending except where noted. These poems should not be circulated in printed
or electronic form.
George
Gulick, Winter Shop Sale 1\28\04
Samantha
Mineo Myers, Inside James Merrill’s Apartment
Michelle
Mitchell-Foust, Pam at the Rock of Forgetting
Judith
Moffett, Decade-Birthday Verses for James Merrill
__________, Sfakian Variations
Mark Doty,
"Thirty Delft
Tiles"
from Sweet Machine
(1998)
Reproduced with the permission of
HarperCollins.
Iconic, archetypal as
tattoos, in lapis,
delphinium, bruise: a
spread of cards,
the blue and white,
promising tableaux
of some chipped
porcelain tarot:
antique tiles, in a
Stonington window,
November, all the stores
closed,
dealers gone. This one,
a Mrs. Mahler, has left
a number,
but she’s not at home
today,
when I’d love to inquire
after
the mermaid on her
outcrop of stone,
the cornflower rooster
crowing
in his field of crackled
glaze.
A boy pipes through
blurry fields
on a blurred flute;
a rinsed hare leaps; a
hero
raises to heaven his
inky sword:
spirits of Water Street,
these images, after
my visit with you. I couldn’t bring myself
to call you Jimmy,
though you asked.
We sat over coffee in
your round red room.
You were gracious, playful
and probably
thoroughly bored by me,
stricken as I was
by the shyness in the
company of a Great Man.
The cup you raised (I
liked how none
of the china on that
round glass matched
or even bore relation)
was Spode,
Blue Italian. I know because Yeats
favored the pattern,
too, and once
I tried to read its
skyey plot
in a case at Thoor
Ballylee:
a pastoral opera lit
entirely
in a single hue: gothic
ruin,
country views unfolding
in exactly that 1950s
elementary-school-fountain-pen
blue. A laundress scrubs
by the riverbank. A priest reads.
Variable beasts
(a clutch of sheep, a
cow or two)
stand up to their
haunches
in the stream, number
depending
on whether one studies
the plate
or saucer, the platter
or tureen.
Which is why, I imagine,
you
and Yeats might like it:
gestures
of surprise, inside the
regularity
of form, hooved or human
actors
playing out their parts
beneath
the stippled trees, a
fixed
but not quite scrutable
tale
unified by this lavish
ink.
Under your red room’s
dome,
we were assuming roles:
the Elder
with his fairy charm –
packed in ice
or salt? – the Pilgrim
stiff and shy
and come to do
honor. What we talked about,
I hardly recall: travel,
poetry readings,
a local boy whose verse
you’d been critiquing;
you were absolute grace,
with that imperturbable
charm which both invites
and protects,
manners aimed at holding
the listener
just close enough. Sandy fixed your stereo
so you could pay
CDs. And then the tour,
which led to your
apartment’s secret core:
behind a hinged
bookcase/door,
the book-paved room in
which you wrote.
It felt like the
interior of a heart.
Or one of those fancy
evening purses,
a jeweled and beaded
minaudiere
turned inside out, the
interior gemmed
with books, and centered
on a draft
of rarest air. Out on the street again,
it seemed I’d breathed
the dazzling
ozone of some other
elevation.
That shop-window field
of Delft
took on a decided tinge
of you:
your cup’s stenciled
round
circling whatever it
held at the core.
I called Mrs. Mahler for
ages
before I finally found
her home;
she quoted a price I
couldn’t afford.
Months later, a last
view: on your gutsy
terrace, a portrait
bust:
one of the late Teutonic
despots
of Rome, nose and
haircut
given an Italian
makeover
by the sculptor’s sense of
Caesarean
convention. Ditched by the local museum,
he’s years enjoyed your
harbor view,
but today three strong
guys come to haul
the emperor away to a
shady site
in Sandy’s garden, a
sheltered if less lofty
perch. Occasion for a tour, for Paul,
who’s never seen the
marvelous shell
of your apartment
before: the paintings
and bric-a-brac of
travel, and Sandover’s
legendary props: bat
wallpaper so dreadful
as to charm, the huge
mirror your DJ hauled
upstairs, the circular
chamber’s bricky,
glowing rose, tin
rotunda picked out
in painted detail – who
was smoking what
when this place was
decorated?
Furniture of a grand
poem, these things
refresh by not being
epic themselves:
unpretentious, warm
still,
welling up with
testimony of you.
Case in point: the Ouija
board,
just a sheet of
cardboard taped
and taped to that glass
table till the corners
were nearly torn
away. Beneath the arc
of alphabet, symbols
you’d added,
for convenience’ sake:
&, some terms
the dead used often, and
(unique to your
board in all the world)
a slash mark,
so the spirits could
indicate
a line break. We’re in heaven, here among
your books, drafts of
poems, evidence
of inhabitation so
intense
it makes death seem –
well, in-
consequential. Which you’d have liked,
I think – who ever so
thoroughly
prepared his own
afterlife?
Though nothing prepared
me, quite,
for that willow-ware
teacup,
your makeshift
planchette
-nothing delicate but
thick, and cracked,
and crazed with
tea-stained lines where stress
had split the glaze,
rough spots
where the cup was glued
and dropped
and glued again: nothing
you’d expect
to bear the tongues of
angels,
but isn’t that always
the way?
God, my dear (is it too
late to assume
the familiar now, as
once you
asked me to?), is in the
damages:
aren’t we always, if
we’re lucky,
ruined into
knowledge? Yet the cup’s
lovers and bridges and
birds
are cheerful and intact,
antiphonal in azure
under their dime-store
glaze.
Mrs. Mahler’s sold the
lot of Delft,
already installed in
someone else’s kitchen,
but what could it
matter;
I’ll be possessed by
them,
a pack of tokens to
shuffle and deal
like gypsy cards:
Pilgrim, Hero, Sage,
no mere emblems but live
as the needled and
figured skin
of some tough boy’s
lucky arms,
indigo and promising,
the inky billows
of trees bent in this
willow-ware glow.
There’s no voice in the
cup now, but
something like static, a
crackle:
wind blowing off the
crystal radio
of the stars? Those warm glowing tubes
inside the back of the
night, is that
where the singing comes
from?
Hear how they fill with
it,
these willows risen at
the rim,
their cobalt ruined
furious and true.
George Gulick, “Winter Shop Sale 1\28\04”
4 days only on Water St
an ad I got & a reply
(This poem appeared on the
Merrill Discussion List.)
A few numbers away on
Water Street!
Plates (hand painted) -
none as dazzling as
you in Tyvek (TM),
"final air", that last
scattering. Did it come
on its own feet
from ceramic Paradiso,
Quimper
Faience? Doors from you
and DJ,
kitsch has takers - 4
days February.
"One of a kind
items" Hurry campers!
How about our pair in
Puritan knickers,
hands to their hats,
balancing candles!
Comments's certain:
"Keep it up! Lest you go out."
"Ah, phallic turns
foolish. Get a handle:
you're dripping."
More kitsch. "You don't get suckers
like that without
bait." It's getting late.
One hesitates to
add...but I'm certainly glad
you got your ash
together.
from Halfway
Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems (1998)
The world was everything that was the case?
Open the case.
--The Book of Ephraim
To keep the blue wave dancing in its prison.
--"Self-Portrait in a Tyvek Windbreaker"
One of Jimmy's
parties. Five at most,
my son is there for
once. His gracious host
takes the boy's hand,
and leisurely they stroll
over to a table where a
bowl
of beach glass gleams in
lamplight. "Pick one
out,"
the poet says of all
these chips of light
subject already to the
child's calm gaze.
It doesn't take him long
to choose his prize.
"How lovely! Jimmy gave you a blue bead!"
I burble the next
morning. Shake of head:
"I chose the
bead. He told me I could
choose."
All the more, then, a
treasure not to lose...
...but lost by us. That bead is now long gone -
misplaced, no doubt, in
the translation
from one place to
another, child to boy.
Time's seen to it that
my son's memory
of the blue bead by now is
buried deep
beneath the fresh
experiences that keep
accumulating. I'd forgotten too.
But Jimmy's dying
brought it back somehow:
the bowl of glass; the
one blue bead bestowed
as choice, not burden;
or as something owed
to friendship, and
passed on at the behest
of simple kindness to
his youngest guest.
I said the gift
consisted of that bit
of lambent glass, now
lost. But it did not.
Rather, like much that
Jimmy left us, this
bead is too clear in
memory now to miss,
just as, although the
man's returned to air,
his personality is
everywhere,
a beacon to me even as I
sit
and choose a phrase and
cross it out and write
another. Word by word and choice by choice,
this process opens up
the jewel case:
the world he left, the
words he leaves us too,
so many little globes of
radiant blue.
from Night Battle (1999)
for James Merrill
(1926-1995)
There in the shallows,
you were treading water,
still a boy of twenty
though a man of sixty,
your shock of gray hair
burning white
as if immersed in
bleach. The day grew hotter.
In this world, the other
world is more distant,
your broken willowware
teacup
rocking on a hook in
someone's kitchen,
far from your homemade
Ouija board.
No mirrors show you've
left behind
your aging friends, no
longer boys themselves.
Your house in Stonington
is a closed tomb
where ghosts like midges
come clotting the evening.
When Odysseus knelt
before the blood-filled pit,
the ghosts streamed out,
anxious for news,
one after the other,
pleading, pleading...
Only one lingered, one
who could not
walk forward to taste
the blood, giant Ajax
who stepped back into
the dark without a word.
The postman stands on
our porch
in pith helmet and bush
shorts,
sweating in subtropical
heat,
but he brings no
postcards from you.
from Hazmat (2002)
in memory of James
Merrill
Years ago--long enough
at least for bitter
Leaves to have cooled at
the bottom of a cup
Then brimful and
steaming with insecurities--
Four spellbound friends
were huddled around
What might as well have
been a campfire,
Their shadows thrown
back on the world
By candlelight, the
flames of anticipation
Fed by skittish
questions of whatever voice
Any one of them had felt
clearing its throat
Inside the jelly lid
with its toothpick pointer
Patrolling a border of
hand-drawn letters--
Not theirs, of course,
the timidly curious
Weekend houseguests in
rainy Stonington,
But JM's, the loom from
which bolts of blues
Lay stacked on his desk,
Ephraim's final galleys.
The master had been
unexpectedly
Summoned by
redundancy--a family crisis--
But insisted . . . look,
the steak's been marinating,
There's plenty to drink,
the weather forecast's glum.
They'd stay? And why not
take an idle turn
At the board? His Honda
was barely in reverse
When Mickey's mop and
pail were blithely tossed
Aside and motley,
ill-fitting robes assumed--
In their case, a cheap
imitation mantle
That, like any religion,
risked mocking
What it worshiped. But
then, how else learn
What can't be taught
than play the earnest fool?
Left alone with a luster
and delirium
About to be cut with
callow, flavorless slush,
They pulled their chairs
up to the round table,
Guarded by votive
griffons, a saltcellar,
And a spineless cactus
that waited patiently
Under a bite-size
crystal hanging from the dome.
Roach clip. Jug wine.
The conventional aids
To inspiration were
reluctantly foresworn
In favor of seltzer and
cold credulity.
They sat there edgily,
hour after hour,
Watching the voices muster
into words--
As when, between the
scenes of a play, the stage
Is briefly darkened but
still slightly visible,
Enough for us to see the
stagehands moving
Furniture around, the
props of what's to come--
So that what had
clumsily been transcribed
Into a notebook later
came clear in ways
Each might have made
light of there in the dark.
A--, for instance, at
thirty pumped-up and tan
But oddly pious and
almost too eager for word
Of how immanent the
Beyond would turn out to be,
A lens in the black box
of lives led here below.
He begins by chance with
Agul, a priest of Aton,
Standoffish and
abstract. Egyptians not concerned
With sin, only
singularity. We wait for sunrise.
Friends exchange
light. Love, light, are one.
I breathe your light.
Aton knows your aspect.
And for those who don't
care, whose beliefs start
When their eyes are
shut? Night is sun for others.
Doggedly the acolyte
buttonholes the board.
At last one Mary
Wentworth gently picks up
The extension, a London
mother and mystic
Two centuries dead. Your
soul, sweet A--,
The shape of a
healthy body, shelters under my wing.
Wing? Down is warmer
than up. Up?
The Pharisees are
cold on their mountain tops.
They will not sin
& so they freeze. Your body
Sins to warm your
heart. How easily tenderness
Rinses the dirty hands
temptation lathers.
Then B--, betrayed by a
Fifties adolescence
Spent peeping at
encyclopedia cross-sections
And nudist colony
glossies--all shrivel and sag--
Until transfixed by
martyred Oscar's wit,
Its gay science devoted
to curing the heart,
Shyly asks, after
combing his hair, for Himself.
The Other Life, within
us or abroad,
Acts--and why not?--as
if it had all the time
In either world,
exaggerating its courtesies.
Wilde extends an
invisible gloved hand
To B--, who stutters
about his nervousness.
Confession is good
for one's soul & one's royalties.
I sold my lower
depths & made a good thing of them.
But his own feelings ...
for the young man, say?
Bosie was ornamental.
That was enough.
No real love then? Your
wife? Constance
Was as her name
suggests. That was not enough.
Though Paris is, of
course, better on the whole,
I think most of
Oxford, where, donning robes,
Pater drew on airy
nothing to burn with aflame
Of the first water,
in whose heat our damp clay
Was fired into well-wrought
urnings. ("The ease,"
B-- marvels, "with
which a practiced stagecraft
Flicks its iridescent
fan!") No window
Can without some
dressing up long hold
A discerning eye. For
birds of our feather
The pen that is a
plume adds panache.
But--oh, this is as
it must be written--
A thousand admiring
eyes in the world
Of letters finally
matter less than the one
Understanding heart
in a country retreat.
Blushing, B-- withdraws,
interested only
In how prudently to
spend his overdraft.
Then C--, whose reedy,
wire-rimmed pretense,
Goosed by Southern
manners and a French degree,
The saccharine-coated
pill B-- had been swallowing
For a decade, insinuates
his clubman's smarm
And succeeds in raising
static on the line.
A giggling Indian
scout--ice filled my seeing,
Great ice-haired
mounts, English--trails off
To a corpuscle who or
which insists eternity
Is the plucked
tension between limit and nothing.
A yawn gets passed
around. A Chinese sage
Wanders across the
screen, dropping fragments
Of a fortune cookie. We
do not gain the moon
By telling her to be
still. Fingers in silhouette
Mug redwood trees, a
German armaments
Tycoon, or chef, or
silent movie vamp,
The manic Cuisinart
finally shredding
Soul into a slaw of
nonsense syllables.
The others glower at C--
and call a break,
When suddenly, as from
another room,
A stricken whisper: Was
I that humpback
At whom you laughed
when you believed me
Out of hearing? Oh
sweet betrayal, my bridegroom!
And D--. (But why
"D--"? His name was Drew.
I knew him, loved him.)
A tenant of his body,
He was hurt by
everything he took for remedy--
Waiting tables,
acupuncture, coke—
And longed to leap
against the painted drop,
Some grand pirouette
center stage, sweat whipped
Into the spotlight,
sequined prince or satyr.
He asks for Isadora. Hail,
friend!
Why do they never
book me anymore?
Drew then nudges into
the dressing room
With a question. Will I
ever dance like you?
You know in your
bones. I died broken on the wheel
Of circumstance. Now
it's just tableau vivant.
The happiness of the
body is all on earth.
The beauty of the
body in motion and repose
I wanted to give,
long after it was probable.
Drew's charged resolve
saw him through the drill
(Temp job to tryout) of
making a name for himself,
Until he met the dancer who
infected him.
The virus flic-flacked
through his system, aswirl
In cells that faltered
and too soon abandoned
The soloist whose
stumble a falling curtain concealed.
For that matter, you
too, JM, have gone
And done it, become a
voice, letters on a page—
Not like love's sweet
thoughtless routine
But a new romance,
hazard and implication,
Promises as yet unmade,
possibilities
Slipping, say, from N
to.... --Oh,
Why will words cohere
and dissolve on this blank
And not their darker
meanings, an unspoken grief
I've reached for and
feel sliding as if over
Posterboard smoothed by
years of being used
To giving back the
bright presence drawn
Up from within yourself,
your starry heart
So empty, so large, too
filled with others
Not to fear an
unworthiness indwelling.
You took everything on
faith but death,
An old friend's or the
breathless lining
Of any new encounter, so
that fresh acolytes,
Once back home, would
remark with wonder
On your
otherworldliness. What they failed
To see was something
that has just now begun
To sink in on me: how
little your detachment
Had to do with the
demands of a formal art
Or a mind at once too
sovereign and too constrained
By being trolled for
schools of thought or feeling.
Stage fright can apply
or smear what make-up
Seems necessary for any
evening’s encores,
And lines rehearsed
before the smoked mirror’s
Critical gaze can turn
to ashes in the mouth
When spoken to some poor
stick mugging there
Who you hope will stay
the night and fear
May last until the end.
How seldom, I sense,
You gave yourself up,
how often instead
Had to borrow back what
had already been lent.
Even the board is under
wraps in a closet upstairs.
Funny, I've not tried to
do it since you died,
Even for a simple
jabbing towards the consoling Yes
In answer to the obvious
questions posed
By missing you. Or have
I instead been fearing
The No--the not-happy No, the not-there No?
Or had you perhaps been
receding all along--
Like those friends of a
quarter century ago,
Faded to vanishing points
like death or California,
Where everything to be
lost is finally regained,
The figures of speech
for once beyond compare?
No. I can hear your voice from the other side,
That kingdom come memory
makes of the past,
The old recordings, the
stiffening onion-skin
Letters your Olivetti
punched out from Athens
Or Isfahan, notebook
cities shaped
By anecdotes of
love--no, antidotes,
Spelled out to be kept
suspended at a distance,
As now I imagine your
nights with pencil and cup.
From my seat, somehow above
or below the table,
Your hand moving
steadily back and forth
Across the board seems
like a wave goodbye.
Samantha
Mineo Myers, “Inside James Merrill's Apartment”
from Caveat Lector (December 2003)
He has already given
life
to the feverish dining
room walls
where I sit with poets
eating cake from square
plates.
The caretakers call him
Jimmy,
say that once he
returned
and left a coffee cup
in the sink,
though tulips on the
table
remind of a grave
marker.
There are four chairs,
each painted a different
shade of Easter.
In the office the
lover's picture
curls from its tack -
his shirt unbuttoned,
his face aggressive and
wrinkled -
in poems he is called
by his initials: DJ
at the Ouija board,
DJ's sundown presence.
Upstairs the floor is checkered,
and alternates
take their cue -
tourmaline cushions
one faded, one deep, and
the piano
with only its ebonies
out of tune.
From the stardeck, light
falls
into the Sound,
and Water Street dusks
with the patience
of one already
immortalized.
We face each other under
fleur-de-lis
and the question of
night,
scribes without mirrors
or Willoware,
with spirits among us.
Michelle
Mitchell-Foust, "Pam at the Rock of Forgetting"
from Imago Mundi (forthcoming)
More on Michelle
Mitchell-Foust
I.
We don't stay by the
water long at dusk
on the way to the
encephalitis scare and
all the broken quiet
when two blue herons
bang against the water
and mad-dash up again
like teens. They mirror the
doves landing
for a second on the tin
lining of the star deck.
An average light grazes
the windows, average
for the orange-glorious
evenings of fall, and gravity
breathes angels into our
muscles, the clouds
for this last moment of
light looking pulled up
by the roots. We find
two starfish, one in this world,
and one in another, and
we throw both back into the sea.
II.
I know the priest has
begun to leave tomatoes
at the door in
Stonington,
the only speck of blood
that makes our day.
I find a meteorite in a
gallery and think
the world might be
destroyed by this, heavier
than it looks, falling
five thousand miles an hour
during this last shower.
A young woman selling
pricey lingerie tells me
she has seen the insides
of a meteorite, so
lovely inside that she asked a guard
for the artist's name at
the exhibition. She was sure
the split star had been
carved, so meticulous
the labyrinth, and she
begs me to break mine in half.
You have to break it, she whispers, and she draws the squares
of lines on a perfume
sample to show me, breathing audibly
as she draws. The
semi-precious stones are the ones
to watch out for, our
invisible host said once,
and in his copy of
Ponge's The Young Girl, he's
underlined
throat. He's written, gage=blossoms.
What can you measure
with a blossom but love?
Now, they're saying,
with the new software,
we can measure
everything on earth by the flower's
inner spiral--a new sign
of the host--
even the eerie leap of
the razor from my hand,
even the miraculous
distance between my hand and your face.
III.
I days have been in the
secret room.
I leave a single shell
among
the quartzes. Its
insides have the sound
of the low whistle of
wind through Coney Island's
metal rides, the live
swans strolling
the roadside water,
perfect as an arcade game.
I leave a chocolate on
the old host's headstone
and head for home. I
never forgot
the woman rushing up
behind me, both of us
entering a gallery of
student paintings,
and whispering Go
left. Go left. so that
both of us expect to
follow her voice,
and upon entering the
hall, she looks around
and turns to me, her
sweater pink and glowing,
and says, He lied to
me. He lied to me.
She runs for the corner
to the other hall,
and disappears, all the
while hoping
that she is wrong about
him.
IV.
In the commons, a
maintenance man stops
his small truck to cut a
woman's ring off,
and the wire cutters
bird over her as she laughs.
It's over, I guess. It's
outside the college cafeteria
that smells like a
circus midway, a burned sweetness
hovering over the metal
umbrellas, the convicts in lime green
folding the carnival
rides from some two-day fair
in on themselves, just
outside the school grounds.
I am wearing the
souvenir shell around my neck—
a real shell once dipped
in silver somewhere
behind the lighthouse
all hung with bones.
I'm so homesick for the
strange place
that I might as well be
putting together an oscillating fan
a beloved has sent, not
knowing what I needed.
Any time of day, I can
turn the silver-covered shell over,
and a little water pours
down my dress.
No matter when the bath
was, no matter
that I've already
accidentally turned the shell
over in the car, running
a hand along my collar
in traffic, or tipped it
over by writing on the board.
Watch Hill's just an
arm-length away,
the juxtaposition of
outrigger and of little boy
who skips as a bird
lifts from the playground.
The genuine cross of
hand and bird make it seem as though
the boy is throwing the
crow up into the burning clouds
with his own hands,
lovely to distraction,
like a table of shells
for sale in the sun.
Judith
Moffett,
"Decade-Birthday Verses for James Merrill"
from The Kenyon
Review
(Summer-Fall 2000).
First published in The Kenyon Review—New
Series, Summer/Fall 2000, Vol XXII, #3/4. Reproduced with permission.
March
3, 1976
Jimmy's fifty! When we
met
Both of us were nine
years brisker.
Time's a thief who loves
to get
Peach fuzz coarsened up
to whisker.
Say I'm female (say too
bad),
Childless, jobless, need
be thrifty;
Say I'm thirty-three;
but add:
Jimmy's fifty!
March
3, 1986
Jimmy's sixty, that when
met
Wasn't quite as old as
Iam(b),
That by sweet example set
Stars into the field of
rhy(a)me.
"Follow,
poet..." Yes, but how?
Half the twinkling
void's betwixt me
Starting out and now;
and now
Jimmy's sixty.
Never catch him, never.
Yet
Though it's nineteen
years or nearly,
Time upon his parapet,
Deeps of space, that
deepen yearly,
Keep the speeding
satellite
Where a clash of forces
fixed me
Far, yet constant
through the night.
("Jimmy's Sixty")
March
3, 1996
1.
Jimmy
isn't seventy.
--Toll,
toll the brazen clapper.
Isn't
nor will ever be.
--Clang,
tongue of zinc and copper.
Damaged
heart and ddl,
Both,
were in that deathday present.
Try
to comprehend it, try--
Jimmy
isn't.
2.
But
is gone, or gone before.
No
one loved him more than I did,
Few,
at times, annoyed him more.
Something
all the same abided,
And
abides, to aim his way,
Blindly,
one last paper arrow.
Final
score at final play:
Seven-zero.
3.
TWO MORE BAT SHAPES IN THE CAVE
(Come, O Death, so silent flying),
Thoughtful
children, and the grave,
And the moon eclipsed and dying
INTO BLACKNESS PARTLY NIGHT'S
Wachet auf! ruft uns die Stimme!
But
the Bridegroom met by lights
Isn't
Jimmy.
4.
Jimmy
kissed me when we met
At
the old hotel in Sweden,
Here
from Athens for the fête;
"Here"
's a rapeseed-gilded Eden.
Presently
two Birkenstocks
Tread
the cobbles, off to dinner--
Purple
suede, with thick green socks
Chafing
thinner.
5.
Dateline:
May of '93,
Half
the town adrift in lilacs.
Jimmy's
none too pleased with me;
Still,
he's here. Two grateful Reeboks
White
on white on white on stone
Lead
the way to Meatball Heaven.
Months
remaining: twenty-one,
Three
times seven.
6.
MATCHES NOW, DID I FORGET--
Light me with your little candle
STAR OR CANDLE BEING LIT. . .
Nothing in the world is single
Singing
in her song she died.
Dear
heart, so did you. SEE
THROUGH ME,
SEE ME THROUGH. You
Know I tried,
Jimmy,
Jimmy—
7.
I
did try, and you did know.
Let
that do, and this be finished.
Fading
in your afterglow,
Life
itself's the thing diminished.
(Oven-birds
make much of this).
Journeys
end in lovers meeting,
--And
one last, Sealed-With-A-Kiss,
Birthday
greeting.
[NOTE: Thanks are due,
in order of appearance, to the following
crafters of trochaic
tetrameters: JM himself (in SMALL CAPS);
Longfellow, Auden,
Millay, J. S. Bach, Shelley, Tennyson, and
Shakespeare (all in
italics). Special acknowledgments to Leigh Hunt and
Robert Frost. ]
We have all seen
predation
by hawk, a thing of swift
and often terrible
beauty
at play in the pastures
of the sky
that, in the turn of a
moment,
reveal its essential
nature,
its hawkness, the
streamers,
gory entrails of some
beloved creature
clutched in its talons
as it turns
and returns to its
eyrie.
But, I have also seen
predation by swan,
startled when I flung
open the back door
in my haste to greet the
early morning,
as was my custom. Huge
and white it was,
not black, not gazing as
it pushed
against the silent
volumes of air
over my tiny pond -- much
too tiny
to be used as a metaphor
for life --
a large, white orb that
wove its way
between plant and pole,
pole and trellis,
to thread itself through
some power lines,
and fly off into the
dawn.
It was an improbable
vision of comic beauty,
in large public display
witnessed through
startled, sleep-stunned,
zoom-lens eyes
adjusting to the
changing light
and shadow pealed from
the surface
of the pond, drifting
upward
in proper swan's-wake
fashion,
absent any private chaos
or streamers of gore.
Only silence and the
transparency of water
held secret in the
moment when things turn.
The colorful shabunken,
the large gold comets,
had disappeared. Where
they should have been,
resting, waiting for
their morning feed,
only a vague erasure
slowly revealed itself.
The friendly calicos and
the fattening white comet
were gone as well. Most
of all, the white comet.
A summer of acquired
trust by nurture,
was required to coax her
from her hidden preserves.
Now there was only the
stillness of pure water,
images of breast-tucked
bills and gazed reflections.
A gliding whiteness is
but paint over
the essential nature of
swan-ness. Black or white,
a paradox only to be
embraced with bird netting
that does not
distinguish color or species;
lace that will not admit
either gobble or gore.
I will get new fish, of
course, but not now.
In the spring, perhaps,
when I come to the edge
of the pond each
morning, as is my custom,
I will do so, not as a
child edging into wonder;
but as a steward beneath
a netted dawn. Perhaps,
then, I will have love
on my lips.
November, 2005
from The Fire in All Things (1993)
For
James Merrill
I
Hornblasts! They jarred
us from the engines' snore
And cheesy air of what
the door sign called
The "Dinning
Room" to spraydrift, sidechurn. Jade
Clouds on indigo
marmalade.
A red line pulled the
hooked seasnake, braided,
Slithering onto
shore--where churches sat,
Skyblue-domed (except
for one, which wore
A little Byzantine
cloche),
Among toy houses, toy
hotels.
I slipped the handbooks
back into my pack.
I had no notion what I'd
come to,
These years ago now. Of
course I knew a name.
How often since I've
rolled it on my tongue--
Paros ,Paros --spoon-sweet of mastic
(Its white a taste of
the town's white)
Served in a glass of
cold well-water, dissolving,
If at all, more slowly
than the sunbow
Airbrushed in spray just
off the Leto's bow,
Afterglow of our escort
dolphin, now
All these years ago, as
we came to.
2
Men on the jetty mending
a golden net,
Bacchanalian
bougainvillea spilling
Over its trelliswork,
swagging plumbago,
And rank lantana, the wayfarer,
its flower
Your "little
Victorian bouquet"—
How many times I've
thought the island up---
Its lush aridity, its
sundry ravelings.
The stove-in windmill
with the winding stair
That someone might
restore
Stood near a winepress,
overgrown,
And a derelict threshing
floor---
Drama itself arrived
once more
At its first stages,
Comedy's very threshold
being razed . . .
Demeter's temple, built
of local marble,
Had long since entered its new life:
Stylobate, lintel, drums
coursed side by side,
A lucent, clear-cut
Doric score of frozen
Music broken and
recomposed
Chockablock in the
Venetian kastro ,
Tumbledown now in the
heart of town.
We'd come upon it, but
we could never find it
Back in those
streets---or alleys, let's say, that maze
Of sunsplashed
whitewash, the candid walkways
Taking us in a new way
every day.
3
Plumbago auriculata . Cape plumbago. Formerly thought to cure lead
poisoning. Takes poor soil. Needs little water. Leaves drop in heavy frosts but
recovery is good. Light blue blossoms may bleach to white. Propagates from
cuttings. Slow to start. Stays low without support. Excellent cover. Good
background plant. Good filler.
--- Guide to
Mediterranean Gardens
Pythian the Thasian
geometer wrote a letter to Conon in which he
asked him how to find a
mirror surface such that when it is placed
facing the sun the rays
reflected from it meet the circumference of a
circle. And when
Zenodorus the astronomer came down to Arcadia and
was introduced to us, he
asked us how to find a mirror surface such
that when it is placed
facing the sun the rays reflected from it meet a
point and thus cause
burning. So we want to explain the answer to the
problem posed by Pythion
and to that posed by Zenodorus . . .
---Diocles,
On Burning Mirrors, Arabic
translation of the lost
Greek
original, edited with English translation and commentary by
G.
J. Toomer (with 37 figures and 24 plates)
Tradition has it that
Hagia Sophia's master architect dispatched his
Parian apprentice, Ignatius,
to build a church, at the Emperor
Justinian's order, on
the site of St. Helena's vision of the True Cross . .
. . When the architect
visited the island to review the completed
structure and found a
defect, Ignatius flung himself from the peak . . .
. While no such flaw is
evident today, it must be admitted that the
church's plan is now
confused, since, rather like a miniature
Canterbury, it has been
repeatedly augmented, revised, and restored.
(One result is that it is
a chasmophile's delight. In addition to the
triforium arches,
diverse niches, nooks, and alcoves appear as one
makes the tour.)
--- A.H. Clarendon, Travels
in the Aegean
4
What was that the dragon
kite was writing
In flamboyant Arabic and
disappearing ink
There on the high Greek
blue sky, its string
In your hands where we
stood on a roof's brink
High on the Greek blue
sky . . .
I meant to be---yes, a
burning mirror!
And yet, back in our
cell, with guides, a lexicon,
An old Hachette, what
was I "working on"?
Translations? Expenses
and itinerary?
And inklings. Linkings .
. .Cross hatching . . .
To church bells' tones,
I worried Paros' own
Archilochus' colloquial
Ionic,
Bawdy, elegant, and
bellicose,
Sharp shards of
contumely and elegy---
And bad jokes for his
good friend Charilaos.
I knew to travel meant to work .
I knew whose absence
should fill up my pages.
And there it is today:
the missing ink.
I wrote: "The
strain is telling, in a word."
(The "word"
was telling? strain ? I couldn't
think.)
5
A study underway that
summer,
High Life Expectancy
on the Island of Paros, Greece ,
Would postulate some
salutary factors:
Scouring winds, rubdowns
with olive oil,
Cheese made from milk of
goats who graze on thyme.
Also home brews of mint
and anise,
Old remedies no one has
known to fail,
The occasional miracle,
the rarer crime,
The burlap bag beneath
the donkey's tail,
Strong local honey,
wine, and families.
The antidote for that
tattoo of needles,
Sea urchin's spines,
snapped off in the heel?
Lean on something and
piss on it.
Specific for some
sharper pains as well.
Who cared where spring
had gone? Or L.
6
And then one evening at
the water's edge,
We watched the
sunlight's riddle in the shallows,
Wavery cloisonné, a
network woven,
Rewoven by the ripples'
scission, ply
And reply. Small fish
like thoughts shot through and through.
A tied up rowboat,
scarlet, freshly painted,
Glossy as though the
lacquer hadn't dried,
Rocked and rocked in light
and light reflected.
Some fine idea's fiery
cradle.
Flames lapped, waves
licked its side.
7
High life indeed.
Stylitic penthouse,
The cubicle we'd rented
Was set atop the hotel's
second story.
The other rooms had
wrought iron balconies.
We had the roof's wide
desert. Beside our entrance,
A crane necked spigot
stood just high enough
To crouch beneath for a
chilling shower.
Inside there were two
beds, one desk, one chair.
A mirror, a jimmied
window. Come cocktail hour,
Our own low roof became
a gallery
From which we looked
into the open air
Ciné Rex next door. That
summer's star
Was Debbie Reynolds as
Soeur Sourire,
"The Singing
Nun," subtitled in dimotikí
.
While she strummed her
guitar,
You reeled off
Apollinaire:
Sous le pont Mirabeau
coule la Seine . . .
Water under the bridge.
And in our whiskies.
"Here's to
Scotching spiteful roomers,"
You could have said.
Here's to one loaded paradise,
There à la belle
étoile . . . A la belle étoile :
Phrase from a little carillon.
A la belle
Etoile . The priest walked through the cloister
At the Church of Our
Lady of the Hundred Gates
And pulled on ropes
linked hiddenly to bells
Hung in the pine above
the lime geraniums,
Whose leaves I crushed
and crushed, greedy for the smell,
The sweet reek on my
fingers.
We sat beneath the
pergola, its star
Jasmine, while bells
rang through the white . . . ruelles .
8
When the meltémia blew
Through and through the
bleached streets,
The lanes winding
Beneath pleached vines,
winds blue
As Debussy's, they blew
disaster out of mind.
After, above the town,
on any breeze,
Scent of wild oregano,
milder chamomile.
Ah, Mother Demeter.
Our Lady of the Hundred
Gates.
The distant hour
chiming. Peal and repeal.
9
Beyond the dovecotes,
beyond the nunnery,
Up in the grove
Dimitri's donkeys plodded to,
Rampant grape and
honeysuckle vines
Entwine the
trees---arbutus, olive, mulberry,
And two gnarled fig
stumps like a pair of Jains.
I see us now. I don't
know why we've come
Again until, trading a
smile with you,
Dimitri walks through
trees, shaking limbs.
From branches where
they've lit to rest
On this stage in their
long, obscure migration,
Thick as the leaves
their closed wings mimic, they spill
And spill, like gusty
autumn come back home,
A million vermilion
moths, a whole confetti
Of them, as we join in,
shaken awake,
Out of the green, out of
the blue and still.
Stephen Yenser,
“Sfakian Variations”
from The Southwest Review (2004: 89, #1)
Postcards
to JM
A goat's bell wakes
us-he's in a tamarisk!-
while the cicadas'
ostinato translates
with its vibratos early
light's moiré
shimmerings rebounding
from the bay
into our high room's
whitewashed plaster.
So that's the news to ruminate
at breakfast.
No politicians
abolishing disaster,
no strings
attached. Or à la Mallarmé,
it's all pure
music-physics, that is to say-
and everything is
strings and vibrates.
*
Melba toast, fresh
orange juice, and coffee.
A horiatikí saláta, bread, and beer.
Ouzo with three ice
cubes and appetizers
and then a plate of "local fish" for dinner.
And in the interims I
read Cavafy,
Stevens, and Yeats and
worry that I hike
too much just in my head
through stubborn stonebrash
herbs and common shrubs,
dry and spiny,
to swim in precious
shallows-turquoise, sapphire.
*
This is a country for
old men. Cicadas
in Judas trees, and
bumblebees among
the bougainvillaea,
succulents, a few
native goldfinches in
their cages hung
above taverna
tables. The beach is stony,
the "ruins"
hardly qualify, each trek
sounds too austerely
beautiful to take.
And one might see from
one's own balcony,
which has the peaks as
well as bight in view,
a lammergeyer swoop to
an old goat's carcass.
*
God gave out gifts to
Crete: to Kissámos,
wine heady as kisses; to
Ierápetra, olives
fleshy and sharp; dark
cherries to Amári.
When the swaggering
Sfakiots at last appeared,
their daggers gleaming,
only rocks remained.
--And how have you
provided for our lives,
they asked him.-Use your
scrubby brains, God sneered.
Can't you see those
farmers work for you?
*
Beside our table on the
littoral,
as we're about to close
the books this evening,
the hill again stands
pat, and the sun
folds again, and the
server folds
our parasol, and water
laps the rocks
louder, begins to come
into its own,
a mood-a mode-that
concentrates, that rocks
the rocks awake to
darker, harder, colder colors,
preparing to be serious,
no longer
marginal. To take us literally as breaths.
We have to change our
lives? We have to die.
*
Here in one poem, just
"a few lines"
(olígous stíchous), sixteen to be precise,
anyone can find the
crucial terms,
several proscribed in
English verse
today, and in the order
quoted now.
"Tasteful" (kalaísthyton) and "polished"(leíon),
constellated around the
name of one Ammónis,
they include
"subtle beauty" (leptí emorphiá),
"elegant" and
"musical" (oraía and mousiká),
and prove the
"craftsmanship" (mastoriá)
of Constantine Cavafy
and inextricably
his "grief" (lipí) and "love" (agápi)
and everywhere his
"feeling" (aísthima)
"for our life"
(apó tín zoí más)
especially for one man,
dead long before,
exemplary poet and
Alexandrian.
*
Mornings, a trance of
cicadas,
invisible, incessant.
A weave of dense white noise,
except it's really a
translucent,
gauzy green, the vibrant
color
water is near the shore
at noon.
An intense tinnitus,
and like that last a
hint to us,
perhaps, of the sound
eternity is-
the great susurrus of
silence
avant la lettre, so to speak.
Though it's here all the
time.
Usually we just don't
notice.
We hear it too in the
inaudible
voices, the traces of
voices
that we have heard and
read.
It's not after all as
though they're not us.
Cavafy says they come to
us
then fade like music at
night.
Another way to put it is
that we fade into those
who note us.
We ventriloquize each
other,
perhaps. Although your ashes
are half this world
away, my friend,
if you are anywhere,
you're here.
Sometimes you just don't
notice.
*
Evening's tavernal transactions
make one think
that so much happens in
between. It's in
between, I mean. On CD Lady Day
moans "Them that's
got shall get,
them that's not shall
lose" and thus calls up
Cavafy's masterly
refusal, whose point
I took from a loved book
you gave to me
decades ago. What I didn't take,
I cannot say, as someone
must have said.
Cavafy said that to
decline is to
decline thenceforth, and
I'm inclined, today,
to agree. Yet there are negatives
that we take confidently
to our graves.
*
This could be
paradise. Because one does not
want
to leave? Except one does not want to leave?
Why, Zeus himself
preferred to be interred here,
as he was born here in
an inland cave.
But somewhere my
airplane's on schedule.
These days, words fall
so quickly into place
I think I'll fall myself
as Icarus
fell right out there
because he couldn't wait
before I've made known
what it is I do want.
*
Mín ksináchte, you inscribed my book:
"Don't
forget." A short but long
Greek sentence.
Don't lose the thread, Daedalus
told
Ariadne to tell
Theseus. And yet
how not to do so, not
even he could say,
and his precocious
Icarus forgot.
When Theseus abandoned
Ariadne,
ripe, faithful, sleeping
on the shore,
the gods forgot him, so
he forgot
to change his sails from
black to white,
and so his anguished
father died, misled.
Never losing himself the
thread,
Daedalus solved the tiny
labyrinth
of a triton shell. As I think Pound,
himself imprisoned by
his own creation,
might have remembered
outside Pisa
("an ant's forefoot
shall save you").
Mín ksináchte. And
yet how not?
The knotted phrase goes
on through its own maze.
I leave its book to my
daughter, whose name is Helen.
*
Soon it will be just the
right time.
The resident kitten, so
affectionate
at first blush, will
turn out to be
neurotically needy. The proprietors'
adorable infant son will
smile
too little to be truly
endearing.
The plumbing, the
mosquitoes, the seamier
undersides of the local
nightlife . . .
Time to dispose,
dispense, pack up, reflect.
Despair at how to take
back all one would.
Put things in order so
the cleaning woman
won't recall one badly,
should one return.
Write those few
thank-you notes.
There's nothing else,
really, to do,
at last. The sunscreen, the local maps,
a travel book or two,
the ferry schedule-
one can leave them
behind for now, for others.
*
Goats bawl and goats'
bells clink
and ice in the glass of
ouzo tinkles back
and that is all the
music-even tzitzíkes
rest and listen-anyone
needs
to face tonight, until
the fog
settles in, thick and
muggy, though cold
and clammy on the
painted railing
around the balcony that
overlooks
this whole small world
one nearly overlooked
and now can't bear to
leave
where the taverna lights
go dimmer
by the minute now and
then are hard
to make out as a
dwelt-on memory
and then and now are
gone.