The Changing Light at Sandover

by James Merrill

  The powers have to be consulted again directly—again, again and again. Our primary task is to learn, not so much what they are said to have said, as how to approach them, evoke fresh speech from them, and understand that speech. In the face of such an assignment, we must all remain dilettantes, whether we like it or not.—Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse

  Rewrite P. It was to be the section

  Golden with end-of-summer light. Impossible

  So long, at least, as there’s no end to summer.

  Late September is a choking furnace.

  Let lightning strike. The god’s own truth, or fiction,

  Blast clean of traffic grime, shudder and decibel

  —Impedimenta of the arch-consumer—

  Those caryatids’ porch who once in fairness

  Held up sky, and now are blind and old.

  Plant with rainshoot glistenings the Elysian

  Smokefield settled above Pindar Street.

  Remake it all into slant, weightless gold:

  Wreath at funeral games for the illusion

  That whatever had been, had been right.

  Revise—or let it stand? Here I’m divided.

  Wrong things in the right light are fair, assuming

  We seize them in some holy flash past words,

  Beyond their consequences and their causes.

  Hair-roots white. The blind, sunset-invaded

  Eyeball. Lucent spittle overbrimming

  Lips wiped of all pretense. And in the ward’s

  Gloom the gleam of tongs, clean stench of gauzes.

  What light there was fell sideways from a mind

  Half dark. We stood and tried to bear

  The stroke for Maya, as her cats had done.

  The other eye, the one that saw, remained

  Full of wit, affection, and despair.

  Then Ghédé mounted her. Brought his whip down.

  DAVID JIMMY I AM YOUNG AT LAST

  WHO ALL THESE YEARS TRIED TO APPEAR SO

  MY HAIR IS TRULY RED EPHRAIM IS STILL

  A COURTIER SHALL I TEACH HIM HOW TO CHACHA

  THE CLIMBERS HERE COUNT & RECOUNT THEIR PAST

  LIVES POOR ME WITH ONLY ONE BUT O

  I NUMBER LOVES ON TOES AND FINGERS TELL

  TEIJI (her young husband) IM A CHESHIRE

  CAT ALL SMILES I LOVE MY WORK ST LUCY

  The St Lucy? SHES MY BOSS IS LETTING

  ME DIRECT SOME AVANTGARDE HALLUCI

  NATIONS ETC FOR HEADS OF STATE

  U SHD HEAR THEM MOAN & FEEL THEM SWEATING

  WE GIRLS HAVE STOPPED A WAR WITH CUBA Great!

  How about Erzulie? BUT SHE IS THE QUEEN

  OF HEAVEN Oh, not Mary? Not Kuan Yin?

  THEY ARE ALL ONE QUINTESSENCE CHANEL NO

  5 × 5 × 5 × 5 × 5

  AMONG HER COUNTLESS FACES I HAVE BEEN

  SMILED ON BY ONE THE SHADES SHE LOOKED WELL IN

  ON EARTH MY FADED POPPYBLUSH & UMBER

  ARE HERE RESTORED I AM HER LITTLEST FAUVE

  The moment brought back Maya in a whiff

  Of blissful grief—small figure boldly hued,

  Never held in high enough esteem;

  Touches of tart and maiden, muse and wife,

  Glowing forth once more from an Étude

  De Jeune Femme no longer dimmed by time.

  Leave to the sonneteer eternal youth.

  His views revised, an older man would say

  He was “content to live it all again.”

  Let this year’s girl meanwhile resume her pose,

  The failing sun its hellbent azimuth.

  Let stolen thunder dwindle out to sea,

  Dusk eat into the marble-pleated gown.

  Such be the test of time that all things pass.

  Swelling, sharpening upwind now—blade

  On grindstone—a deep shriek? The Sunday stadium.

  Twenty thousand throats one single throat

  Hoarse with instinct, blood calling to blood

  —Calling as well to mind the good gray medium

  Blankly uttering someone else’s threat.

  Stevens imagined the imagination

  And God as one; the imagination, also,

  As that which presses back, in parlous times,

  Against “the pressure of reality.”

  Scholia discordant (who could say?)

  Yet coursing with heart’s-blood the moment read.

  Whatever E imagined—my novel didn’t

  Press back enough, or pressed back against him—

  He showed his hand, he nipped it in the bud.

  Heaven was fraught with tantrums, cloudy thinking,

  Blind spots. A certain frail tenacity

  All too human throve behind the Veil.

  True, he had spared me as it were a lifetime

  Spent in one tedious, ungainly form

  NO PUNISHMENT LIKE THAT OF BEING GIVEN

  A GROSS OR SLUGGISH REPRESENTATIVE

  I though imagined that the novel was

  A step towards reality AWAY

  FROM IT JM an effort to survey

  The arteries of Ephraim’s influence.

  With just myself and D to set the scale

  What could we learn? I needed neutral ground

  LISEZ VOS COEURS SAYS MY NEW FRIEND H BEYLE

  Needed Joanna lost among arroyos—

  Each the abraded, vast, baked-rose detail

  Of a primeval circulatory system—

  So as to measure by triangulation

  Heights up there beyond the height of self,

  Or so that (when the fall rains fell) would go

  Flashing through me a perfected flow,

  Landscape and figures once removed, in glass

  TWICE REMOVED THANKS TO MY COUP DE GRACE

  …The point is, I still wake—I woke today—

  Between two worksheets. Missing you, Sergei:

  From above your basin peered the Noh

  Mask of a hermit with brown rice-grain teeth

  And close-cropped silver hair.

  A clown of dust. An earthen Pierrot.

  Who once danced, you stood rooted, moved by fierce

  Young men at the pueblo. You no more

  Felt the cold than they did,

  Though the sun stamped and sweltered in their furs.

  Another evening at the Ouija board

  (Which only worked when you were side by side,

  Fingertips touching hers—

  That woman, smoking, auburn-haired, abhorred)

  A word from Eros made it all worthwhile:

  UPON MY STAGE DEAD HUNTERS DANCED IN TIME

  WITH THOSE U SAW BELOW

  Leo, transcribing it, looked up. His smile.

  And one night playing Patience, having lost

  Your own, three-quarters through the novel, rum

  Igniting in the dark’s

  Uncurtained glitter heat and gasp of lust,

  Leo SHADES OF AN EMPERORS FAVORITE

  Risen aglow before you, the tinbacked

  Kerosene lamp his face—

  You’d fling cards, curses, tumbler, all, at it

  Then stumbling on resourceful Mrs Smith

  (Who settled you in this adobe hell

  With just enough to live on,

  Who with a kiss flew off to marry myth

  Yet still, from the Palazzo Santofior,

  Remember
s you with gifts too rare to keep)

  Would rip her from her frame

  And grandly show the pieces to the door.

  Pallid root-threads. A blue sky inverted

  In waterglass. The Greek geranium

  Snapped off last week unthinkingly lives on.

  Forgets that, short of never to be born,

  Best is an early, painless death. Its ruffled

  Leaf is cool, and smells of rained-on tin.

  It neither cringes at my tread nor pines

  To join a riot of kin out on the terrace,

  Let alone its ancestor who inherits

  Maria’s garden, a salt radiance…

  It seems to tolerate me, turn to me

  For—ah, not strength, or even company,

  But coolly, as who have no more to lose

  Welcome a messenger from the gods.

  Live on—is that the message? Dear Sergei,

  It is what we do against all odds.

  You should know, scion and spit of the old man

  Who nearly twenty years ago, remember?

  Bowed across to us from the church tower.

  When he was cut down I took slips of him

  To set in tidy ballad stanza-boxes

  Made, one winter, about Stonington.

  His pliant manners and sharp-scented death

  Came up Japanese. You came up Russian

  —Next to a showy hybrid “Mrs Smith”.

  Here you are now, old self in a new form.

  Some of those roots look stronger, some have died.

  Tell me, tell me, as I turn to you,

  What every moment does, has done, will do—

  Questions one simply cannot face in person.

  Freshening its water, I feel faint

  Waves of recognition, my red flower

  Not yet in the dread phrase cut-and-dried.

  The figure in the mirror stealing looks

  At length replied, although its lips were sealed:

  “Contrary to appearances, you and I

  Who pick our barefoot ways toward one another

  Through playing cards and grums of class

  Over checkerboard linoleum

  Have not seen eye to eye. We represent

  Isms diametrically proposed.

  You clothe my mowing as I don your flask.

  Our summit meetings turn on the forever

  Vaster, thinner skin of things, glass blower’s

  Tour de force—white-hot, red-hot at dusk,

  All that we dread by midnight will have burst

  Into a drifting, cooling soot of light,

  Each speck a voodoo bullet dodged in vain

  Or stopped with sangfroid—is the moment now?

  At sunrise? Yet the hangfire talks go on.

  Current events no sooner sped than din,

  One wand hashes the other. I bring up

  That not quite settled matter of a far

  Flushed mountain. You clam down the bold fried scenes

  Between us. Is it breakfast on death row

  Or token of the next fumbling détente?

  No more incidents! Admit we have

  Designs on the same backwardly emerging

  Notion rich in dream-deposits, raw

  Dignity, circumspection—all that we lack.

  Designs? you whisper with a shamefaced look.

  Precisely. Orderings of experience.

  From Dante’s circles to Kandinsky’s, thence

  To Don Giovanni trammelled in D Minor

  Strings, or Garbo in aloof demeanor.

  Utterly harmless (though the Third World will

  Cry, true to form, aesthetic overkill)

  And tit for tat, besides. Need I, mon cher,

  Expatiate on how we figure there?—

  You in its communes as a crudely colored

  Capitalist gorged on oil and gold,

  The vocal, comic member of the team;

  I in its temples as a slitherer

  Tombless, untamed, whose least coalfire-blue scale

  The phantom of an infant whimpers from…”

  Unrelenting fluency. Sergei

  Steeled himself to move beyond its range.

  The waterfall that day. Chill tremblings floored

  A space to catch one’s death in. Or sun shone

  And no wind blew, and soft white inchdeep mist

  Crept over dry ice. Wall to wall’s

  Reverberation of a spectral chord,

  All the white keys at once came thudding down.

  The old man’s heart sank. “Eros, if I must,”

  He said out loud, “I go behind the falls.

  Make him be there, my angel, and alive—

  Anything you say I will believe.”

  Some later chapter would have found Sergei

  Kneeling to drink. And further yet upstream

  Scudding, skydark veneer on oak, on aspen.

  Bold forms from the hip down overgrown

  With ginger sediment, a retriever’s pelt,

  Risen above the running, dry as bone.

  Stones named on a picnic with DJ

  Summers ago, or only yesterday,

  For figures—Nebuchadnezzar, Little Nell,

  Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag, Swann and Odette—

  Pride of (and telling proof against) the clean

  Sweep they impel so swiftly they impede.

  Only yesterday! Too violent,

  I once thought, that foreshortening in Proust—

  A world abruptly old, whitehaired, a reader

  Looking up in puzzlement to fathom

  Whether ten years or forty have gone by.

  Young, I mistook it for an unconvincing

  Trick of the teller. It was truth instead

  Babbling through his own astonishment.

  Higher than this I do not, dare not climb—

  Too near the end of the unwritten book.

  Exeunt severally the forces joined

  By Eros—Eros in whose mouth the least

  Dull fact had shone of old, a wetted pebble.

  Now along crevices inch rivulets

  At every turning balked. Joanna jets

  Back where she came from, through a sky in flames

  (And with her a symbolic apparatus

  Requiring that she have been “routed”—how

  I never asked myself, and do not now;

  Much less ask why my characters had names

  That linked them with the four Evangelists,

  Plus the beast familiar to one).

  As the sun melts an undercrust of snow

  Leo is healed. His little boy is born.

  An overhang’s thin wail. From my hatband

  Taking the wraith of withered pink—Sergei—

  I crumble it unthinking. When the urge

  Comes to make water, a thin brass-hot stream

  Sails out into the updraft, spattering

  One impotent old tree that shakes its claws.

  The droplets atomize, evaporate

  To dazzlement a blankness overdusts

  Pale blue, then paler blue. It stops at nothing.

  U ARE SO QUICK MES CHERS I FEEL WE HAVE

  SKIPPING THE DULL CLASSROOM DONE IT ALL

  AT THE SALON LEVEL Done? Ah yes—

  Learned his lesson, saved his face and God’s:

  Issues put on ice this evening.

  It’s late last June, a long impromptu call

  (Our
only one in ages) to take leave

  Before DJ goes West, and I to Greece.

  The atmosphere is easy, unreproachful.

  How have we done, how can we do without

  Our “regulars”—their charm, their levity!

  E quotes Tiberius NO GOLD SO LIGHT

  AS PURE AMUSEMENT Here is Alice T,

  Maria, Marius—we’ll need more chairs.

  Hans, even, from the Ministry upstairs

  Looks in to show that all has been forgiven.

  Here’s Maya. If one can believe her, Heaven

  Hangs on her black Félicité newborn

  In Port-au-Prince. To my surprise, all burn

  To read more of this poem. Ford and Clay

  Look up from the gazette where Section K

  Has just been published: POPE SAYS THAT WHILE BITS

  STILL WANT POLISHING THE WHOLES A RITZ

  BIG AS A DIAMOND I would rather hear

  Mr Stevens on the subject—mere

  Bric-a-brac? mere Emersonian “herbs

  And apples”? I WAS NEVER ONE FOR BLURBS

  TAKE WITH A GRAIN OF SALT JM SUCH PRAISE

  A SCRIBE SITS BY YOU CONSTANTLY THESE DAYS

  DOING WHAT HE MUST TO INTERWEAVE

  YOUR LINES WITH MEANINGS YOU CANNOT CONCEIVE

  Parts of this, in other words—a rotten

  Thing to insinuate—have been ghostwritten?

  PARDON ME A GLIMPSE OF LOVELY MAYA

  THANKS BY THE WAY FOR GUIDING ME TO HER

  U KNOW the latter takes our hands to say

  WE ARE ALL BROUGHT TOGETHER BY THE CUP

  FROM FLOOR TO FLOOR A CHIME SOUNDS E IS WHISKED

  INTO OUR MIDST & THE RECEPTION STARTS

  BUT DO U TRULY THINK DEAR FRIENDS DEAR HEARTS

  The cup half dancing, Maya no more than we

  Knowing, it seemed, what lay in store

  OUR PRATTLE HAS NO END BEYOND ITSELF

  DAVID PUT OUT YR CIGARETTE NOW PLACE

  YR FREE HAND PALMDOWN YES ON THE BOARDS EDGE

  —That very palm, in no time, creased, red, sore

  As if it had been trod on for attention—

  By What? or Whom? Our cup,