After colliding with a cloudberg, the chopper
sinks through more, like feelings gone soft
around the edges, forming shapeless moist
masses and as easily dissolving, until underhead
we approach the ashen, lopsided cones,
the brimstone stench of steam, the mess of gods.
Headphones dip into the sliding plates
dragged over soft forces divided by stress,
some fracturing crust of indifference
through which the buried magma seeps.
Or have I got it all wrong again?
Does he mean instead that, once home,
after we’re back, set down, driven off,
the sunset’s backwash sloshing
in the rearview’s little sac of sorrows,
the tremors will start again, the leakage?
LITTLE ELEGY
But now that I am used to pain,
Its knuckles in my mouth the same
Today as yesterday, the cause
As clear-obscure as who’s to blame,
A fascination with the flaws
Sets in—the plundered heart, the pause
Between those earnest, oversold
Liberties that took like laws.
What should have been I never told,
Afraid of outbursts you’d withhold.
Why are desires something to share?
I’m shivering, though it isn’t cold.
Beneath your window, I stand and stare.
The planets turn. The trees are bare.
I’ll toss a pebble at the pane,
But softly, knowing you are not there.
OUIJA
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 worshipped. 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 griffins, 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 buffed and tan
But oddly pious and almost too eager for word
Of how immanent the Beyond would turn out to be,
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——, saddled with 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 a flame
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 frag
ments
Of a fortune cookie. We do not gain the moon
By telling her to be still. Fingers in silhouette
Mug redwood trees, or 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 corsair 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 O … —Oh,
Why will words cohere and dissolve on this blank
And not their darker meanings, an unspoken grief
I’ve reached for and felt sliding as if over
Poster board 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 spent
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 toward 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 onionskin
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.
in memory of James Merrill
from MERCURY DRESSING
2009
MERCURY DRESSING
To steal a glance and, anxious, see
Him slipping into transparency—
The feathered helmet already in place,
Its shadow fallen across his face
(His hooded sex its counterpart)—
Unsteadies the routines of the heart.
If I reach out and touch his wing,
What harm, what help might he then bring?
But suddenly he disappears,
As so much else has down the years …
Until I feel him deep inside
The emptiness, preoccupied.
His nerve electrifies the air.
His message is his being there.
ER
I hesitate to mention now the time
I hesitated—was it weeks or months?—
Before telling him I was leaving, leaving for good,
So that, in the end, it was he who left me,
And my fear of his decision, or no … well,
His tonelessly announcing it one night,
Only that, always that, has clouded the scene,
Not unlike the way the years of happiness
Until that day, all of them a delusion,
Had prevented my recalling just how long
I’d waited to discover my feelings at the start.
Two weeks—no, less—on my own, secret cell
Phone calls, a rented post office box,
The desperate joking, the passionate or-elses,
Seemed only to discover the nowhere
I lingered in, the time I wanted to postpone
Hurting myself or him, the time I wanted
To wait until I could turn into something
He would never leave. Years later, forcing me
To divide the shoebox full of snapshots
Or the letters from our long-dead companions,
He waited while I chose, through tears, the things
I didn’t want to see, and did not look back
Through the closing door, though it only seemed
As if he were standing there and I was falling
Back, back to a time when I couldn’t delay
Any longer, the time I leaned down to select
My lot, lying there on the ground, in the field,
Where I recognized so many others waiting their turn.
•
In Plato’s Republic, there is an explanation of this.
Twelve days after his death in battle, the body of Er—
Son of Armenius, a hero of legend in far Pamphylia—
As torches were readied, came to life again on his funeral pyre,
And told what he had seen of the other world,
That his soul in a crush of companions had journeyed
To a mysterious place, two openings, it seemed, in the earth
And two others above, between them the seats of judges
Who bound men to their sentences, that they should climb
Or descend, the symbols of their deeds fastened to their backs.
But Er was told only to watch and bear the message back to men.
He saw the dead arrive, dusty with travel, and the souls
Of those already saved step down into a meadow to meet them.
Those who knew one another embraced and wept at tales
Of what they had endured and seen, while those above
Told of delights to come, of injustices reversed, of tyrants
Cast into terrors worse than they had themselves inflicted.
Er then looked up at a column of light to which the chains
Of heaven were attached that held the spindle of Necessity,
Its eight hollowed whorls broadening into spangled ranks
Of wheeling planetary orbits moving as they must,
Each sounding a note in harmony with the rest, and the Fates
Adding their overtones, their hands touching, turning,
Guiding the spindle through its past, its present, its future.
As Er looked on, each mortal soul was asked to choose its genius.
The first were told not to be careless, the last not to despair—
Each would have the lot of his desire, the length of a new life.
Er stood in astonishment as, one after another, men and women,
Because the memory of their previous lives was still so strong,
Asked to be animals in the next, no matter bird or beast,
A blameless, unknowing being not in love with death.
The soul that had once been Orpheus chose the life of a swan,
Not wanting to be born of a woman, hating
The race of women who had murdered him.
Others chose sparrow or horse or, remembering their pain,
An eagle that could circle the slain in their bloody armor,
Slowly circle, high over what men do to themselves.
Then each was given a cup of Unmindfulness
From which some carelessly drank too much
And some too little, so that the past would haunt them.
Er himself was kept from drinking, and how
His body was returned he could never say,
But as the others were driven, like stars shooting,
Up to their births in the world, torches were lit
And Er suddenly woke and found himself