The Changing Light at Sandover

by James Merrill

  And on—“I’ll watch a film of when they mate,

  If I can stand it,” he will say at lunch—

  But for her manners. Here I stand,

  Friend of her friend, whom she must either love

  Or overlook or maul. Here is her hand

  Reaching out for me, its charcoal glove

  Scuffed and wrinkled; myself taken in

  Before I know it, by uncritical eyes

  —Unlike the moment—as we solemnize

  Our new (our old) relation: kissing kin.

  Moment that in me made the “happy” sign

  Like nothing I—like nothing but that whole

  Fantastic monkey business of the soul

  Between lives, gathered to its patron’s breast.

  All those years, what else had so obsessed

  The representatives of Clay and Ford?

  Weren’t we still groping, like Miranda, toward

  Some higher level?—subjects in a vast

  Investigation whose objective cast,

  Far from denying temperament, indeed

  Flung it like caution to the winds, like seed.

  Take the equivocal episode beginning

  When Gopping-Simpson’s mother lets the baby

  Drown in the bath. Ephraim, beside himself,

  Asks don’t we know any strong sane woman

  In early pregnancy, reborn to whom

  His charge would have a running start on life?

  Hold on! who’d wish the likes of Gopping

  On his worst enemy? But Ephraim briskly

  Counters with a thousand-word show-stopping

  Paean to the GREAT GENETIC GOD

  By whose conclusion we cannot but feel

  So thoroughly exempted from ideal

  Lab conditions as to stride roughshod

  Past angels all agape, and pluck the weird

  Sister of Things to Come by her white beard.

  I mention my niece Betsy. D has had

  Word from an ex-roommate, name of Thad,

  Whose wife Gin—that will be Virginia—West,

  A skier and Phi Bete, is on the nest.

  Ephraim, delighted, causes time to fly

  (For he is hesitant to SLIP THE SOULS

  LIKE CORRESPONDENCE INTO PIGEONHOLES

  Until he hears, out of the womb forthcoming

  Late in the sixth month, a MELODIOUS HUMMING

  —Which, heard there, would do much to clarify

  Another year’s abortion talks in Rome)

  And sure enough, soon after Labor Day

  Not only he-of-Gopping but—get this—

  Ham’s Joselito, who drinks lye

  At the eleventh hour, are at home,

  One in Virginia, one in Beatrice.

  Cause indeed for self-congratulation.

  Diplomats without portfolio,

  We had achieved, it seemed in the first glow,

  At last some kind of workable relation

  Between the two worlds. Had bypassed religion,

  Its missionary rancor and red tape

  No usefuller than the Zen master’s top

  Secret lost in silence, or in pidgin.

  Had left heredity, Narcissus bent

  Above the gene pool. As at a thrown stick,

  Still waking echoes of that give-and-take

  —Repercussions dire in the event—

  Between one floating realm unseen powers rule

  (Rod upon mild silver rod, like meter

  Broken in fleet cahoots with subject matter)

  And one we feel is ours, and call the real,

  The flat distinction of Miranda’s kiss

  Floods both. No longer, as in bad old pre-

  Ephraim days, do I naively pray

  For the remission of their synthesis.

  Guests were now descending on our village

  Hideaway, drawn by the glowing space

  Beneath its dome. Who were they? Patrons, mostly,

  Of all whose names we mentioned. Any night

  A Zulu chieftain could rub elbows with

  Jenny, a pallid Burne-Jones acrolith,

  Patrons respectively of a chum of mine,

  Dead in grammar school, and Gertrude Stein,

  Both safely back—he’ll tell us where—on Earth;

  But what is our time, what is Ephraim’s worth?

  Once stroked, once fed by us, stray souls maneuver

  Round the teacup for a chance to glide

  (As DJ yawns, quick!) to the warmth inside.

  Where some of course belong: patrons of living

  Dear ones—parents, friends—we dutifully

  Ask after. Few surprises here. E’s tact

  Encourages us—PATRON NOT UNHOPEFUL

  Meaning that things are really pretty grim—

  To drop the subject. We don’t challenge him.

  If Maya is a WHITE WITCH or my father

  ONLY IN HIS OLD AGE MAKING PROGRESS

  It figures in both cases. And if Mary Jackson

  Has narrowly, as a Sicilian child,

  MISSED SAINTHOOD she deserves the martyr’s palm

  With oakleaf cluster for those thirty-nine

  Mortal years with Matt. The lady from

  Kyoto (Mary’s patron) raises fine

  Eyebrows—as if wives could choose!—then giggling

  Calls MFJ a BLOSSOMING PLUM BRANCH

  IN MY HUMBLE TOKONOMA Others crowd

  About us. Wallace Stevens, dead that summer,

  Reads us jottings from his slate of cloud,

  Graciously finds a phrase of mine to quote

  —But ouf! So much esprit has left us quite

  Parched for a double shot of corps.

  We need a real, live guest. So Maya comes,

  And soon to a spellbinding tape—dream-drums—

  Can be discovered laying down in flour

  Erzulie’s heart-emblem on the floor.

  That evening she danced merengues with us.

  Then Ephraim, summoned, had her stand between

  Two mirrors—candle-scissorings of gold;

  Told her she was in her FIRST LAST ONLY

  Life, that she knew it, that she had no patron.

  The cat she felt kept dying in her stead

  Did exactly that. She was its patron.

  Smoke-ring enigmas formed to levitate

  Into a swaying blur above the head.

  Ephraim, we understood, was pleased; but Maya

  Found him too much the courtier living for pleasure.

  LETS HOPE THE LIVED FOR PLEASURE WILL NOT BE

  ALL MINE WHEN YR WHITE WITCH SETS EYES ON ME

  Whereupon Maya stiffens. She has heard

  A faint miaow—we all have. In comes Maisie,

  Calico self-possession six weeks old,

  Already promising to outpoise by ounces

  Ephraim as the household heavyweight.

  Maya, shaken, falls into a chair.

  She’s had enough. Cattily we infer

  E rocked the boat by getting her birthdate

  Five years wrong; and not for five more years

  Figure out that he had been correct.

  Maya departs for city, cat, and lover.

  The days grow shorter. Summer’s over.

  We take long walks among the flying leaves

  And ponder turnings taken by our lives.

  Look at each other closely, as friends will
<
br />   On parting. This is not farewell,

  Not now. Yet something in the sad

  End-of-season light remains unsaid.

  For Hans at last has entered the red room—

  Hans who on his deathbed had still smiled

  Into my eyes. He and our friend are friends now.

  He teaches Ephraim modern European

  History, philosophy, and music.

  E is most curious about the latter.

  What simpleminded song and dance he knew

  Has reached the stage of what H calls TRANSFERRED

  EXPERIENCE So we must play him great

  Works—Das Lied von der Erde and Apollon Musagète—

  While like a bored subscriber the cup fidgets…

  More important, Ephraim learns that Hans

  Has INTERVENED on my behalf

  As patrons may not. To have done so requires

  SOME POWERFUL MEMORY OR AFFINITY

  (Plato intervened for Wallace Stevens).

  In any case HL REMEMBERS U

  STILL HEARS THRU U JM A VERNAL MUSIC

  THIS WILL BE YR LAST LIFE THANKS TO HIM

  —News that like so much of Ephraim’s leaves me

  Of two minds. Do I want it all to end?

  If there’s a choice—and what about my friend?

  What about David? Will he too—? DJ

  HAS COME ALL THINGS CONSIDERED A LONG WAY

  What things? Well, that his previous thirty-four

  Lives ended either in the cradle or

  By violence, the gallows or the knife.

  Why was this? U DID NOT TAKE TO LIFE

  Now, however, one or two, at most

  Three lives more—John Clay, a beaming host

  ALREADY PLANS THE GALA—Stop, oh stop!

  Ephraim, this cannot be borne. We live

  Together. And if you are on the level

  Some consciousness survives—right? Right.

  Now tell me, what conceivable delight

  Lies for either of us in the prospect

  Of an eternity without the other?

  Why not both be reborn? Which at least spares one

  Dressing up as the Blessed Damozel

  At Heaven’s Bar to intervene—oh hell,

  Stop me. You meant no harm. But, well, forgive

  My saying so, that was insensitive.

  His answer’s unrecorded. The cloud passed

  More quickly than the shade it cast,

  Foreshadower of nothing, dearest heart,

  But the dim wish of lives to drift apart.

  Times we’ve felt, returning to this house

  Together, separately, back from somewhere—

  Still in coat and muffler, turning up

  The thermostat while a slow eddying

  Chill about our ankles all but purrs—

  The junk mail bristling, ornaments in pairs

  Gazing straight through us, dust-bitten, vindictive—

  Felt a ghost of roughness underfoot.

  There it was, the valentine that Maya,

  Kneeling on our threshold, drew to bless us:

  Of white meal sprinkled then with rum and lit,

  Heart once intricate as birdsong, it

  Hardened on the spot. Much come-and-go

  Has blackened, pared the scabby curlicue

  Down to smatterings which, even so,

  Promise to last this lifetime. That will do.

  High upon darkness, emptiness—at a height

  Our stories equalled—on a pane’s trapeze

  Had swung beyond the sill now this entire

  Rosy-lit interior: food, drink,

  People at table, sheer Gemütlichkeit

  Of insupportable hypotheses

  Hovering there. It was a pied-à-terre

  Made for his at-homes, we liked to think.

  Though when the autumn winds blew how it trembled!

  What speed-of-light redecorations,

  As we began to move from place to place,

  It suffered—presto! room and guests assembled

  By a flicked switch, the host’s own presence

  Everywhere felt, who never showed his face.

  How could we see him? DIE his answer came

  Followed by the seemlier afterthought

  HYPNOSIS With a how-to-do-it book

  From the Amherst library (that year I taught)

  On the first try, one evening in mid-fall,

  I put D under. Ephraim had coyly threatened

  To lead us BY THE HAND TO PARADISE

  & NOT LET GO We were alone, with Maisie,

  In a white farmhouse up a gravel road

  Where Frost had visited. DJ’s oldfashioned

  Trust in nature human and divine

  Was anything but Frostian. As for mine,

  Trances like these are merciful, and end

  I prayed. We held hands. We invoked our friend.

  The stillness deepened. Garlands of long dead

  Roses hung on every wall. Was Ephraim there?

  No cup would move, this time. D’s lips instead

  Did, and a voice not his, less near,

  Deeper than his, now limpid, now unclear,

  Said where he was was room for me as well.

  Whose for that matter was the hand I held?

  It had grown cool, impersonal. It led

  Me to a deep black couch, and stroked my face

  The blood had drained from. Caught up in his strong

  Flow of compulsion, mine was to resist.

  The more thrilled through, the less I went along,

  A river stone, blind, clenched against whatever

  Was happening that once. (Only this May

  D lets me have the notes he made next morning,

  Wherein a number of small touches rhyme

  With Maya’s dream—as we shall see.) The room

  Grown dim, an undrawn curtain in the panes’

  Glass night tawnily maned, lit from below

  So that hair-wisps of brightness quickened slowly

  the limbs & torso muscled by long folds of

  an unemasculated Blake nude. Who then

  actually was in the room, at arm’s length,

  glowing with strength, asking if he pleased me. I

  said yes. His smile was that of an old friend, so

  casual. Hair golden, eyes that amazing

  blood-washed gold our headlights catch, foxes perhaps

  or wildcats. He looked, oh, 25 but seemed

  light years older. As he stroked J’s face & throat

  I felt a stab of the old possessiveness.

  Souls can’t feel at E’s level. He somehow was

  using me, my senses, to touch JM who

  this morning swears it was my hand stroking him.

  (Typical of J to keep, throughout, staring

  off somewhere else.) Now Ephraim tried to lead me

  to the mirror and I held back. Putting his

  hand on me then, my excitement, which he breathed

  smiling, already fading, to keep secret

  Eyebeam sparkling coolly into black,

  Lips rippling back into the glass-warp, breathing

  Love…So much, so little, David saw.

  That was before our brush with Divine Law.

  I’d rather skip this part, but courage—

  What we dream up must be lived down, I think.

  I went to my ex-shrink

&nbs
p; With the whole story, right through the miscarriage

  Of plans for Joselito. He

  Got born to a VIRGINIA WEST IN STATE

  ASYLUM —D too late

  Recalls “Gin’s” real name: Jennifer Marie.

  (The following week, I’ll scarcely dare

  Ask after Betsy. But her child, it seems,

  OUTDOES THE WILDEST DREAMS

  OF PATRONS Whew. And later, when through fair

  Silk bangs, at six months, Wendell peers

  Up at me, what are such serene blue eyes

  For, but to recognize—?

  However.) We have MEDDLED And the POWERS

  ARE FURIOUS Hans, in Dutch and grim,

  May send no further word. Ephraim they’ve brought

  Before a kind of court

  And thrown the book (the Good Book? YES) at him.

  We now scare him with flippancies.

  DO U WANT TO LOSE ME WELL U COULD

  AGENTS CAN BREAK OUR CODE

  TO SMITHEREENS How Kafka! PLEASE O PLEASE

  Whereupon the cup went dead,

  And since then—no response, hard as we’ve tried,

  “And so I just thought I’d…”

  Winding up lamely. “Quite,” the doctor said,

  Exuding insight. “There’s a phrase

  You may have heard—what you and David do

  We call folie à deux.

  Harmless; but can you find no simpler ways

  To sound each other’s depths of spirit

  Than taking literally that epigram

  Of Wilde’s I’m getting damn

  Tired of hearing my best patients parrot?”

  “Given a mask, you mean, we’ll tell—?”

  Tom nodded. “So the truth was what we heard?”

  “A truth,” he shrugged. “It’s hard

  To speak of the truth. Now suppose you spell

  It out. What underlies these odd

  Inseminations by psycho-roulette?”

  I stared, then saw the light:

  “Somewhere a Father Figure shakes his rod

  At sons who have not sired a child?

  Through our own spirit we can both proclaim

  And shuffle off the blame