James Merill

[Mirabell]

We have no thread on James fucking Merrill? A shame, I say. He's one of the great American poets of the last century (and a fantastic novelist, to boot), and both the collected poems, as well as his long poem The Changing Light At Sandover are really indispensable to lovers of poetry. He's so good it sends shivers down my spine. I mean, I nearly forgot, what with all the dross one comes to read. But I contemplated sending someone a volume of Merill's poems just now (until I decided it wasn't really worth it), and thumbed through my copies of his books...hot damn!

here is the obligatory wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Merrill


and here are two of his best known poems. Lost in Translation, and Tony: Ending the Life, one of my favorite (aids-related) elegies.

James Merrill: Lost in Translation
for Richard Howard



Diese Tage, die leer dir scheinen
und wertlos f?r das All,
haben Wurzeln zwischen den Steinen
und trinken dort ?berall.


A card table in the library stands ready
To receive the puzzle which keeps never coming.
Daylight shines in or lamplight down
Upon the tense oasis of green felt.
Full of unfulfillment, life goes on,
Mirage arisen from time's trickling sands
Or fallen piecemeal into place:
German lesson, picnic, see-saw, walk
With the collie who "did everything but talk"?
Sour windfalls of the orchard back of us.
A summer without parents is the puzzle,
Or should be. But the boy, day after day,
Writes in his Line-a-Day No puzzle.

He's in love, at least. His French Mademoiselle,
In real life a widow since Verdun,
Is stout, plain, carrot-haired, devout.
She prays for him, as does a cur? in Alsace,
Sews costumes for his marionettes,
Helps him to keep behind the scene
Whose sidelit goosegirl, speaking with his voice,
Plays Guinevere as well as Gunmoll Jean.
Or else at bedtime in his tight embrace
Tells him her own French hopes, her German fears,
Her?but what more is there to tell?
Having known grief and hardship, Mademoiselle
Knows little more. Her languages. Her place.
Noon coffee. Mail. The watch that also waited
Pinned to her heart, poor gold, throws up its hands?
No puzzle! Steaming bitterness
Her sugars draw pops back into his mouth, translated:
"Patience, ch?ri. Geduld, mein Schatz."
(Thus, reading Val?ry the other evening
And seeming to recall a Rilke version of "Palme,"
That sunlit paradigm whereby the tree
Taps a sweet wellspring of authority,
The hour came back. Patience dans l'azur.
Geduld im . . . Himmelblau? Mademoiselle.)

Out of the blue, as promised, of a New York
Puzzle-rental shop the puzzle comes?
A superior one, containing a thousand hand-sawn,
Sandal-scented pieces. Many take
Shapes known already?the craftsman's repertoire
Nice in its limitation?from other puzzles:
Witch on broomstick, ostrich, hourglass,
Even (surely not just in retrospect)
An inchling, innocently branching palm.
These can be put aside, made stories of
While Mademoiselle spreads out the rest face-up,
Herself excited as a child; or questioned
Like incoherent faces in a crowd,
Each with its scrap of highly colored
Evidence the Law must piece together.
Sky-blue ostrich? Likely story.
Mauve of the witch's cloak white, severed fingers
Pluck? Detain her. The plot thickens
As all at once two pieces interlock.

Mademoiselle does borders?(Not so fast.
A London dusk, December last.
Chatter silenced in the library
This grown man reenters, wearing grey.
A medium. All except him have seen
Panel slid back, recess explored,
An object at once unique and common
Displayed, planted in a plain tole
Casket the subject now considers
Through shut eyes, saying in effect:
"Even as voices reach me vaguely
A dry saw-shriek drowns them out,
Some loud machinery? a lumber mill?
Far uphill in the fir forest
Trees tower, tense with shock,
Groaning and cracking as they crash groundward.
But hidden here is a freak fragment
Of a pattern complex in appearance only.
What it seems to show is superficial
Next to that long-term lamination
Of hazard and craft, the karma that has
Made it matter in the first place.
Plywood. Piece of a puzzle." Applause
Acknowledged by an opening of lids
Upon the thing itself. A sudden dread?
But to go back. All this lay years ahead.)

Mademoiselle does borders. Straight-edge pieces
Align themselves with earth or sky
In twos and threes, naive cosmogonists
Whose views clash. Nomad inlanders meanwhile
Begin to cluster where the totem
Of a certain vibrant egg-yolk yellow
Or pelt of what emerging animal
Acts on the straggler like a trumpet call
To form a more sophisticated unit.
By suppertime two ragged wooden clouds
Have formed. In one, a Sheik with beard
And flashing sword hilt (he is all but finished)
Steps forward on a tiger skin. A piece
Snaps shut, and fangs gnash out at us!
In the second cloud?they gaze from cloud to cloud
With marked if undecipherable feeling?
Most of a dark-eyed woman veiled in mauve
Is being helped down from her camel (kneeling)
By a small backward-looking slave or page-boy
(Her son, thinks Mademoiselle mistakenly)
Whose feet have not been found. But lucky finds
In the last minutes before bed
Anchor both factions to the scene's limits
And, by so doing, orient
Them eye to eye across the green abyss.
The yellow promises, oh bliss,
To be in time a sumptuous tent.

Puzzle begun I write in the day's space,
Then, while she bathes, peek at Mademoiselle's
Page to the cur?: ". . . cette innocente m?re,
Ce pauvre enfant, que deviendront-ils?"
Her azure script is curlicued like pieces
Of the puzzle she will be telling him about.
(Fearful incuriosity of childhood!
"Tu as l'accent allemande" said Dominique.
Indeed. Mademoiselle was only French by marriage.
Child of an English mother, a remote
Descendant of the great explorer Speke,
And Prussian father. No one knew. I heard it
Long afterwards from her nephew, a UN
Interpreter. His matter-of-fact account
Touched old strings. My poor Mademoiselle,
With 1939 about to shake
This world where "each was the enemy, each the friend"
To its foundations, kept, though signed in blood,
Her peace a shameful secret to the end.)
"Schlaf wohl, ch?ri." Her kiss. Her thumb
Crossing my brow against the dreams to come.

This World that shifts like sand, its unforeseen
Consolidations and elate routine,
Whose Potentate had lacked a retinue?
Lo! it assembles on the shrinking Green.

Gunmetal-skinned or pale, all plumes and scars,
Of Vassalage the noblest avatars?
The very coffee-bearer in his vair
Vest is a swart Highness, next to ours.

Kef easing Boredom, and iced syrups, thirst,
In guessed-at glooms old wives who know the worst
Outsweat that virile fiction of the New:
"Insh'Allah, he will tire?" "?or kill her first!"

(Hardly a proper subject for the Home,
Work of?dear Richard, I shall let you comb
Archives and learned journals for his name?
A minor lion attending on G?r?me.)

While, thick as Thebes whose presently complete
Gates close behind them, Houri and Afreet
Both claim the Page. He wonders whom to serve,
And what his duties are, and where his feet,

And if we'll find, as some before us did,
That piece of Distance deep in which lies hid
Your tiny apex sugary with sun,
Eternal Triangle, Great Pyramid!

Then Sky alone is left, a hundred blue
Fragments in revolution, with no clue
To where a Niche will open. Quite a task,
Putting together Heaven, yet we do.

It's done. Here under the table all along
Were those missing feet. It's done.

The dog's tail thumping. Mademoiselle sketching
Costumes for a coming harem drama
To star the goosegirl. All too soon the swift
Dismantling. Lifted by two corners,
The puzzle hung together?and did not.
Irresistibly a populace
Unstitched of its attachments, rattled down.
Power went to pieces as the witch
Slithered easily from Virtue's gown.
The blue held out for time, but crumbled, too.
The city had long fallen, and the tent,
A separating sauce mousseline,
Been swept away. Remained the green
On which the grown-ups gambled. A green dusk.
First lightning bugs. Last glow of west
Green in the false eyes of (coincidence)
Our mangy tiger safe on his bared hearth.

Before the puzzle was boxed and readdressed
To the puzzle shop in the mid-Sixties,
Something tells me that one piece contrived
To stay in the boy's pocket. How do I know?
I know because so many later puzzles
Had missing pieces?Maggie Teyte's high notes
Gone at the war's end, end of the vogue for collies,
A house torn down; and hadn't Mademoiselle
Kept back her pitiful bit of truth as well?
I've spent the last days, furthermore,
Ransacking Athens for that translation of "Palme."
Neither the Goethehaus nor the National Library
Seems able to unearth it. Yet I can't
Just be imagining. I've seen it. Know
How much of the sun-ripe original
Felicity Rilke made himself forego
(Who loved French words?verger, m?r, parfumer)
In order to render its underlying sense.
Know already in that tongue of his
What Pains, what monolithic Truths
Shadow stanza to stanza's symmetrical
Rhyme-rutted pavement. Know that ground plan left
Sublime and barren, where the warm Romance
Stone by stone faded, cooled; the fluted nouns
Made taller, lonelier than life
By leaf-carved capitals in the afterglow.
The owlet umlaut peeps and hoots
Above the open vowel. And after rain
A deep reverberation fills with stars.

Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?

But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found?I wander through the ruin of S
Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)
And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory.

James Merrill: Tony: Ending the LIfe


Across the sea at Alexandria
Shallow and glittering, a single shroud-
Shaped cloud had stolen, leaving as it paused
The underworld dilated, a wide pupil's
Downward shaft. The not-yet-to-be-mined
Villa, a fortune of stone cards each summer
Less readable, more crushing, lay in wait
Beneath the blue-green sand of the sea-floor.
Plump in schoolboy shorts, you peered and peered.
For wasn't youth like that - its deep charades
Revealed to us alone by passing shades?
But then years, too, would pass. And in the glow
Of what came next, the Alexandria
You brought to life would up and go:
Bars, beaches, British troops (so slim - yum yum!),
The parties above all. Contagious laughter,
Sparkle and hum and flow,
Saved you from weighty insights just below;
Till from another shore
(Folégrandros, the western end of Crete)
Age, astonished, saw those heavy things
Lifted by tricky prisms into light,
Lifted like holy offerings,
Gemlike, disinterested,
Within the fleet
Reliquary of wave upon wave as it crested.

I let my beard grow.
The locals took it for a badge of grief.
Had someone died?
Of course beards came in every conceivable format -
Dapper, avunular, deadbeat...
Mine warned of something creepier - uh-oh!
For over throat and lips had spread a doormat
On which to wipe filth brought in from the street.

Unfair! The boys were talkative and fun;
Far cleaner than my mind, after a bath.
Such episodes, when all was said and done,
Sweetened their reflective aftermath:
The denizens discovered in a dive
Relieved us (if not overlong or overmuch).
"Just see," the mirror breathed, "see who's alive,
Who hasn't forfeited the common touch,

The longing to lead everybody's life
- Lifelong daydream of precisely those
Whom privilege or talent set apart:
How to atone for the achieved uniqueness?
By dying everybody's death, dear heart -
Saint, terrorist, fishwife. Stench that appalls.
Famines, machine guns, the Great Plague (your sickness),
Rending of garments, cries, mass burials.

I'd watched my beard sprout in the mirror's grave.
Mirrors are graves, as all can see:
Knew this emerging mask would outlast me,
Just as the life outlasts us, that we led?
And then one evening, off it came. No more
Visions of the deep. These lines behave
As if we were already gone - not so!
Although of course each time's a closer shave.

One New Year?s Eve, on midnight's razor stroke,
Kisses, a round of whiskies. You then drew
Forth from your pocket a brightness, that season?s new
Two drachma piece, I fancied, taking the joke
- But no. Proud of your gift, you warned: "Don't leave
The barman this. Look twice." My double take
Lit on a grave young fourteen-carat queen
In profile. Heavens preserve us! and long live

Orbits of Majesty whereby her solar
Metal sets the standard. (A certain five-dollar
Piece, redeemed for paper - astute maneuver -
Taught me from then on: don?t trust Presidents.)
Here it buys real estate. From the packed bus's
Racket and reek a newly-struck face glints
No increment of doubt or fear debases.
Speaking of heavens, Maria, a prime mover

In ours, one winter twilight telephoned:
Not for you to see her so far gone,
but to pick up, inside the unlatched door,
A satchel for safekeeping. Done and done,
You called from home to say. But such a weight,
Who lifted it? No one. She'd had to kick,
Inch by inch, your legacy down the hall,
The heavy bag of gold, her setting sun.

The sea is dark here at day's end
And the moon is gaunt, half-dead
Like an old woman - like Madame Curie
Above her vats of pitchblende
Stirred dawn to dusk religiously
Out in the freezing garden shed.

It is a boot camp large and stark
To which you will be going.
Wave upon wave of you. The halls are crowded,
Unlit, the ceiling fixtures shrouded.
Advancing through the crush, the matriarch
Holds something up, mysteriously glowing.

Fruit of her dream and labor, see, it?s here
(See too how scarred her fingertips):
The elemental sliver
Of matter heading for its own eclipse
And ours - this "lumière de l'avenir"
Passed hand to hand with a faint shiver:

Light that confutes the noonday blaze.
A cool uncanny blue streams from her vial,
Bathing the disappearers
Who asked no better than to gaze and gaze?
Too soon your own turn came. Denial
No longer fogged the mirrors.

You stumbled forth into the glare -
Blood-red ribbon where you'd struck your face.
Pills washed down with ouzo hadn't worked.
Now while the whole street buzzed and lurked
The paramedics left you there,
Returning costumed for a walk in Space.

The nurse thrust forms at you to sign,
then flung away her tainted pen
...Lie back now in that heat
Older than Time, whose golden regimen
Still makes the palm grow tall and the date sweet?
Come, a last sip of wine.

Lie back. Over the sea
Sweeps, faint at first, the harpist's cord.
Purple with mourning, the royal barge gasps nearer.
Is it a test? A triumph? No more terror:
How did your namesake, lovesick Anthony,
Meet the end? By falling on his sword

- A story in Plutarch
The plump boy knew from History class.
Slowly the room grows dark.
Stavro who's been reading you the news
Turns on a nightlight. No more views.
Just your head, nodding off in windowglass.

[JTolle]

Reading over the LGBT thread, I was inspired to spend some of the night rereading Merrill and dipping at random into his Collected Poems. The poem "Morning Glory" from his collection The Inner Room (1988) was perhaps my happiest unexpected encounter. A random section or two:


1

The bud a foreskin? More so as it wilts--
The vine of any afternoon
Drooping with once radiant antennae,
Now purplish, drained, the rite of passage done,
That generation's at-a-blow adults
Going obediently to seed.

As if a plant could disobey!
--In whose encyclicals ego alone
Is sacrilege. Why, even among the blue
Tuareg of the Atlas foothills a certain few
Will have remained, like you and me,
True to the miracle, or its memory:

The single day, at six or seven,
When each was little but a wide-ribbed haven
Tuned wholly to the cosmic one
Of pulsing depths, blue deepest overhead,
And where, though busy Eros visited,
All we knew, all we lived for, was the Sun.

[...]

5

Every day the line of bloom gets higher,
And now the topmost flares
Go off, sky-bright in bright sky. There's
No last-ditch rescue for--or from--our own
Natures, who so aspire
To the unknown.

Any charring from those bursts of fire?
Open just one
Tiny bronze-purple thurible: briquettes!
Black as coal next year, they'll catch, they'll climb,
Repeating their tribe's miniature
Resurrection myth, where seed is savior.

For like the Sun, behavior that begets
Calls for a camera obscura
To distance, or domesticate, it in.
It's the unknown,
Here in these stanzas, in your lover's eyes--
The radiant pinhole shadows fertilize.

[Mirabell]

He's so damn good!

[Cleanthess]

It's[/I] the unknown,
Here in these stanzas, in your lover's eyes--
The radiant pinhole shadows fertilize.

Really? People find this kind of stuff good?
Maybe it's me, but his poems strike me more as unfunny jokes than poetry.
I started reading this thread with high hopes, maybe I've had bad luck when randomly choosing some of Merill's poems to read. As I read poems selected by people who like his poetry, I found every line uglier than the one before, every idea sillier than the one before, everything tacky, disgusting, fake, random...
Anyway... another one of life's many mysteries: how Mr. Merill was published, let alone read.
And before I'm accused of not liking modern American poetry I love the poems of: Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Anthony Hecht, Robinson Jeffers, Laura Riding, Howard Nemerov, James Wright, Alan Dugan, W. S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, etc.

P.S. Just to be completely clear, since judging the tone of a post on an internet forum is difficult, I wrote the above comments in a facetious tone. I'm playing 'boke' with my stupid statements and waiting for my 'tsukkomi' from Merill well-informed readers explaining why his poetry is subtle and superbe.