The Changing Light at Sandover

by James Merrill

  No, no! Set in our ways

  As in a garden’s, glittered

  A whole small globe—our life, our life, our life:

  Rinsed with mercury

  Throughout to this bespattered

  Fruit of reflection, rife

  With Art Nouveau distortion

  (Each other, clouds and trees).

  What made a mirror flout its flat convention?

  Surfacing as a solid

  Among our crudities,

  To toss them like a salad?

  And what was the sensation

  When stars alone like bees

  Crawled numbly over it?

  And why did all the birds eye it with caution?

  It did no harm, just brightly

  Kept up appearances.

  Not always. On occasion

  Fatigue or disbelief

  Mottled the silver lining.

  Then, as it were, our life saw through that craze

  Of its own creation

  Into another life.

  Lit by a single candle after dining

  TRY THINKING OF THE BEDROOM WALLPAPER

  And without having to close my eyes come

  Gray-blue irises, wine intervals.

  A window gasping back of me. The oil-lamp

  Twirling white knobs of an unvarnished bureau.

  It’s sunset next. It’s no place that I’ve been.

  Outside, the veldt stops at a red ravine,

  The bad pain in my chest grown bearable.

  WHO ARE U A name comes: I’m Rufus…Farmer?

  FARMETTON DEC 1925

  December? YES DECEMBER AND Deceased!

  How much of this is my imagination

  Sweating to graduate from private school?

  I’m in bed. Younger than myself. I can’t…

  GO ON I hear them in the vestibule.

  WHO Peter? YES & Hedwig? PETERS AUNT

  And Peter is my…YR GREAT HAPPINESS

  So, bit by bit, the puzzle’s put together

  Or else it’s disassembled, bit by bit.

  Hot pebbles. Noon is striking. U HAVE STUMBLED

  Upon an entry in a childish hand.

  The whole book quivers. Strikes me like a curse:

  These clues, so lightly scattered in reverse

  Order, aren’t they plain from where I stand?

  The journal lies on Peter’s desk. HE NOW

  NO LONGER LOCKS HIS ROOM not since my illness,

  Heart-room where misgivings gnaw, I know.

  Eyes in the mirror—so I’ve woken—stare,

  Blue, stricken, through a shock of reddish hair

  —Can we stop now please? U DID WELL JM

  DEATHS ARE TRAUMATIC FEW REMEMBER THEM

  Maya in the city has a dream:

  People in evening dress move through a blaze

  Of chandeliers, white orchids, silver trays

  Dense with bubbling glassfuls. Suavities

  Of early talking pictures, although no

  Word is spoken. One she seems to know

  Has joined her, radiant with his wish to please.

  She is a girl again, his fire-clear eyes

  Turning her beautiful, limber, wise,

  Except that she alone wears mourning weeds

  That weigh unbearably until he leads

  Her to a spring, or source, oh wonder! in

  Whose shining depths her gown turns white, her jet

  To diamonds, and black veil to bridal snow.

  Her features are unchanged, yet her pale skin

  Is black, with glowing nostrils—a not yet

  Printed self…Then it is time to go.

  Long trials, his eyes convey, must intervene

  Before they meet again. A first, last kiss

  And fadeout. Dream? She wakes from it in bliss.

  So what does that turn out to mean?

  Well, Maya has lately moved to the top floor

  Of a brownstone whence, a hundred and six years

  Ago, a lady more or less her age

  Passed respectably to the First Stage.

  Now (explains Ephraim) in a case like this

  At least a century goes by before

  One night comes when the soul, revisiting

  Its deathplace here below, locates and enters

  On the spot a sleeping form its own

  Age and sex (easier said than done

  In rural or depopulated areas:

  E treats us here to the hilarious

  Upshot of a Sioux brave’s having chosen

  By mistake a hibernating bear).

  Masked in that sleeping person, then, the soul

  For a few outwardly uneventful hours—

  Position shifting, pillowcrease, a night

  Of faint sounds, gleams, moonset, mosquito bite—

  Severs what LAST THREADS bind it to the world.

  Meanwhile (here comes the interesting bit)

  The sleeper’s soul, dislodged, replaces it

  In Heaven. Ephraim now, remembering

  Her from that distant weekend, pulls a string

  THIS TIME AT LEAST NO GRIZZLY ON RAMPAGE

  Transferring Maya’s dream to his own Stage.

  And who was her admirer? CANT U GUESS

  But is that how you generally dress,

  You dead, in 1930’s evening clothes?

  WE ARE CORRECT IN STYLES THE DREAMER KNOWS

  This dream, he blandly adds, is a low-budget

  Remake—imagine—of the Paradiso.

  Not otherwise its poet toured the spheres

  While Someone very highly placed up there,

  Donning his bonnet, in and out through that

  Now famous nose haled the cool Tuscan night.

  The resulting masterpiece takes years to write;

  More, since the dogma of its day

  Calls for a Purgatory, for a Hell,

  Both of which Dante thereupon, from footage

  Too dim or private to expose, invents.

  His Heaven, though, as one cannot but sense,

  Tercet by tercet, is pure Show and Tell.

  (Film buffs may recall the closing scene

  Of Maya’s “Ritual in Transfigured Time.”

  The young white actress gowned and veiled in black

  Walks out into a calm, shining sea.

  It covers her. Then downward on the screen,

  Feetfirst in phosphorescent negative

  Glides her stilled person: a black bride.

  Worth mentioning as well may be that “white

  Darkness”—her own phrase—which Maya felt

  Steal up through her leg from the dirt floor

  During the ceremony in whose course

  Erzulie would ride her like a horse.)

  How were they to be kept down on the farm,

  Those bumpkin seers, now that they had seen

  Paris—the Piraeus—Paradise?

  Had gleaned from nightclub ultraviolet

  The glint of teeth, jeans flexing white as fire,

  A cleavage’s firm shade haltered in pearl…

  Where were we? On unsteady ground. Earth, Heaven;

  Reality, Projection—half-stoned couples

  Doing the Chicken-and-the-Egg till dawn.

  Which came first? And would two never come

  Together, sleep then in each other’s arms

  Above the stables rich with dung and hay?

 
Our senses hurt. So much was still undone.

  So many questions would remain unuttered.

  Often on either pillow tossed a head

  In heat for this or that conceptual

  Milkmaid hired to elevate the chore,

  Infect the groom, and drive the old gray mare

  Straight off her rocker. Often, having seen

  A film of Maya’s, read a page of Dante,

  Nothing was for it but to rise and shine

  Not in the fields, god knew, or in blue air

  But through the spectacles put on to focus

  That one surface to be truly scratched—

  A new day’s quota of shortsighted prose.

  Notes for the ill-starred novel. Ephraim’s name

  Is Eros—household slave of Ptolemy,

  Alexandria’s great astronomer.

  We glimpse him, young head on his master’s knee,

  Young eyes full of sparkling patterns, ears

  Of propositions not just from the spheres.

  He lets us understand that heaven went

  A step beyond its own enlightenment

  And taught the slave of intellect to feel.

  More than a slave then, as my several “real”

  Characters would learn, caught one by one

  In his implacable panopticon.

  Old Matt and Lucy Prentiss? This inane

  Philemon and Baucis entertain

  A guest untwigged by either as divine

  Till after he has turned them to scrub pine

  —Figuratively of course. Sergei, their queer

  Neighbor uphill, whom every seventh year

  Some new unseemly passion overthrows,

  Adds him to a list of Tadzios.

  Next, swagger in his tone, Eros the Stud

  Rejuvenates Joanna’s tired blood,

  And in the bargain keeps her hooks

  Off Old Matt’s bank account and Leo’s looks.

  To Leo and Ellen, who presumably

  Love only one another, let me see…

  Let Leo rather, on the evening

  He lets himself be hypnotized, see Eros.

  Head fallen back, lips parted, and tongue flexed

  Glistening between small perfect teeth;

  Hands excitedly, while the others watch,

  Roving the to them invisible

  Shoulders, belly, crotch; a gasp, a moan—

  Ellen takes Lucy’s arm and leaves the room.

  She is too young to cope, a platinum-

  Haired innocent, who helps her grandmother.

  Well before this scene we shall have had

  Pages about her solitude, her qualms.

  Back comes a different Leo from Vietnam,

  “Rehabilitated.” Clear gray eyes

  Set in that face emotion has long ceased

  To animate (except as heat waves do

  A quarry of brown marble) give no clue.

  If only a psychiatrist, a priest—

  For she can neither reach nor exorcise

  This Leo. Now he wants their baby born

  As Eros’s new representative.

  What is it when the person that you live

  With, live for, no longer—? She is torn

  Between distaste and fright. Leo, or someone,

  Has made a theatre of their bedroom—footlights,

  Music, mirror, glistening jellies, nightly

  Performances whose choreography

  Eros dictates and, the next day, applauds.

  Half of Ellen watches from the wings

  Her spangled, spotlit twin before those packed

  Houses of the dead, where love is act

  Not sacrament; and struggles to dismiss

  As figment of their common fancy this

  Tyrannical ubiquitous voyeur

  Only to feel within her the child stir.

  And Leo feels? Why, just that Eros knows.

  Goes wherever they go. Watches. Cares.

  Lighthearted, light at heart. A candle

  Haloing itself, the bedroom mirror’s

  Wreath of scratches fiery-fine as hairs

  (Joanna closes Middlemarch downstairs)

  Making sense for once of long attrition.

  Can feel his crippling debt to—to the world—

  Hearth where the nightlong village of desire

  Shrieks and drowns in automatic fire—

  Can feel this debt repaid in currency

  Plentiful and precious as the free

  Heart-high chamiso’s windswept gold that frost

  Hurts into blossom at no further cost.

  To touch on these unspeakables you want

  The spry nuances of a Bach courante

  Or brook that running slips into a shawl

  Of crystal noise—at last, the waterfall.

  (It’s deep in Indian land. Some earlier chapter

  Can have Sergei drawing a map for Leo.)

  Stepping through it drenched, he finds himself

  On the far side of reflection, a deep shelf

  Hidden from the nakedest of eyes.

  Asked where he is, Eros must improvise

  HE IS WITH ME The others panic—dead?

  In fact (let this be where the orgies led)

  Leo in tears is kneeling by the bones

  He somehow knew would be there. Human ones.

  A seance can have been devoted to

  That young Pueblo, dead these hundred years,

  Whose spirit SEEKS REPOSE (One of the others

  Has killed him in a previous life? Yes.)

  Whose features Leo now hallucinates:

  Smooth skin, mouth gentle, eyes expressionless—

  The “spy” his outfit caught, one bamboo-slender

  Child ringed round by twenty weary men—

  Expressionless even when Leo—even when—

  Sleep overtakes him clasping what he loathes

  And loves, the dead self dressed in his own clothes.

  O’s of mildest light glance through the years.

  Athens. This breathless August night.

  Moonglow starts from scratches as my oval

  Cheval-glass tilting earthward by itself

  —The rider nodding and the reins gone slack—

  Converges with lamplight ten winters back.

  Strato squats within the brilliant zero,

  Craning at his bare shoulder where a spot

  Burns “like fire” invisible to me.

  Thinking what? he studies his fair skin

  So smooth, so hairless. O MY DEAR HES IN

  HIS 1ST MANS LIFE WHAT WD U HAVE HIM DO

  His first man’s…was he something else before?

  The cup shrugs eloquently. How we bore

  You, Ephraim! NO BUT THE UNSEASONED SOUL

  LIKE QUICKLY BURNING TIMBER WARMS A BED

  TOO SOON OF ASHES YOU & D ARE COAL

  Pedigree that dampens us. We’ve wanted

  Consuming passions; these refine instead.

  Lifted through each level I call mine,

  Deposits rich in elemental C

  Yield such regret and wit as MERRILY

  GLOW ON when limbs licked blazing past recall

  Are banked where interest is minimal.

  I recall virtues—Strato’s qualities

  All are virtues back in ’64.

  Humor that breaks into an easy lope

  Of evasion my two poor legs cannot hope

 
To keep up with. Devotion absolute

  Moments on end, till some besetting itch

  Galvanizes him, or a stray bitch.

  (However seldom in my line to feel,

  I most love those for whom the world is real.)

  Shine of light green eyes, enthusiasm

  Panting and warm across the kindly chasm.

  Also, when I claim a right not written

  Into our bond, that bristling snap of fear

  Recalling which I now—and don’t forget

  How often, Ephraim, one has played your pet—

  Take back my question. What he was is clear.

  Woken, much later, by a lullaby:

  Devil-baby altos, gibbous moans

  Unseeing into whose black midst I flung

  Cold water, pulled the shutters to,

  Then lay in stillness under the dense ceiling

  Seeking, in stillness the odd raindrop kissed,

  Contours of what unmasterable throes

  Had driven to this pitch their vocalist.

  Greece was too much for Maisie. She’d grown old

  Flights above the street. Now, worse than vile

  Food, vile customs, than finding her place in my bed—

  In her bed—taken, came these myriad

  Voices repellently familiar

  Undulating over clammy tile

  Toward the half mad old virgin Henry James

  Might have made of her, and this James had.

  The side of me that deeply took her side

  Was now a wall. Turning her face to it

  She read the blankness there, and died—

  Gone with the carrier pigeon’s homing sense,

  The stilted gallantry of the whooping crane:

  Endangered insights that at best would crown

  Another hopeless reading of Lorenz.

  Where but from such natures had ours come?

  TOO MANY CHATTY STUDENTS TOO FEW DUMB

  TEACHERS he’d say in ’70, & THE SCHOOLS

  ARE CLOSING SO TO SPEAK LACKING THE WOLF

  THE PIG THE HORSE WE MORE & MORE MAKE DO

  WITH LESS EVOLVED MATERIAL You mean…?

  I MEAN ALL MEAN CLOSEQUARTERED THINGS WHO SELF

  DESTRUCT YET SPARE A NUCLEUS TO BREED BACK

  ONE CAN BUT HOPE A SHARPERSIGHTED PACK

  Instinctive pupils glowered in the tomb.

  THE CAT LOOK IS A LOCK WHERE CONSCIOUSNESS