The Changing Light at Sandover

by James Merrill

  What I think I feel now, by its own nature

  Remains beyond my power to say outright,

  Short of grasping the naked current where it

  Flows through field and book, dog howling, the firelit

  Glances, the caresses, whatever draws us

  To, and insulates us from, the absolute—

  The absolute which wonderfully, this slow

  December noon of clear blue time zones flown through

  Toward relatives and friends, more and more sounds like

  The kind of pear-bellied early instrument

  Skills all but lost are wanted, or the phoenix

  Quill of passion, to pluck a minor scale from

  And to let the silence after each note sing.

  So Time has—but who needs that nom de plume? I’ve—

  We’ve modulated. Keys ever remoter

  Lock our friend among the golden things that go

  Without saying, the loves no longer called up

  Or named. We’ve grown autumnal, mild. We’ve reached a

  Stage through him that he will never himself reach.

  Back underground he sinks, a stream, the latest

  Recurrent figure out of mythology

  To lend his young beauty to a living grave

  In order that Earth bloom another season.

  Shall I come lighter-hearted to that Spring-tide

  Knowing it must be fathomed without a guide?

  With no one, nothing along those lines—or these

  Whose writing, if not justifies, so mirrors,

  So embodies up to now some guiding force,

  It can’t simply be written off. In neither

  The world’s poem nor the poem’s world have I

  Learned to think for myself, much. The twinklings of

  Insight hurt or elude the naked eye, no

  Metrical lens to focus them, no kismet

  Veiled as a stern rhyme sound, to obey whose wink

  Floods with rapture its galaxy of sisters.

  Muse and maker, each at a loss without the

  —Oh but my foot has gone to sleep! Gingerly

  I prod it: painful, slow, hilarious twinges

  Of reawakening, recirculation;

  Pulsars intuiting the universe once

  More, this net of loose talk tightening to verse,

  And verse once more revolving between poles—

  Gassy expansion and succinct collapse—

  Till Heaven is all peppered with black holes,

  Vanishing points for the superfluous

  Matter elided (just in time perhaps)

  By the conclusion of a passage thus….

  Years have gone by. How often in their course

  I’ve “done” for people bits of this story.

  Hoping for what response from each in turn—

  Tom’s analytic cool? Alison’s shrewd

  Silence? or Milton’s ghastly on the spot

  Conversion complete with rival spirit

  And breakdown, not long afterwards, in Truth

  Or Consequences? None of these. Much less

  Auden’s searingly gentle grimace of

  Impatience with folderol—his dogma

  Substantial, rooted like a social tooth

  In some great Philistine-destroying jaw.

  During one of our last conversations

  (Wystan had just died) we got through to him.

  He sounded pleased with his NEW PROLE BODY

  And likened Heaven to A NEW MACHINE

  But a gust of mortal anxiety

  Blew, his speech guttered, there were papers YES

  A BOX in Oxford that must QUICKLY BE

  QUICKLY BURNED—breaking off: he’d overstepped,

  Been told so. Then the same mechanical,

  Kind, preoccupied GOODNIGHT that ended

  One’s evenings with the dear man. Our turn now

  To be preoccupied. Wystan had merged

  Briefly with Tiberius, that first night,

  Urging destruction of a manuscript—

  Remember?—buried beneath a red stone

  At the empire’s heart. And in the final

  Analysis, who didn’t have at heart

  Both a buried book and a voice that said

  Destroy it? How sensible had we been

  To dig up this material of ours?

  What if BURN THE BOX had been demotic

  For Children, while you can, let some last flame

  Coat these walls, the lives you lived, relive them?

  Here we had nothing if not room for that

  (Fine connections, scratches on a mirror,

  Illusion of coherence garlanding

  Their answer, the old questioners back home)—

  Candlelight shadowboxing in the dome

  Brought like a cheerful if increasingly

  Absent mind to bear upon the chatter

  Below, the rosy dregs, the chicken bones.

  Here was DJ, too. Home from the senior

  Citizen desert ghetto his parents

  Live on in. Oh, they’re living, the poor old

  Helpless woman and the rich old skinflint

  Who now, if no one’s there to stop him, beats

  Intelligence back into her, or tries.

  “Don’t mind her,” giggles Mary of herself,

  “She’s crazy—just don’t hurt her,” nervously

  Hiding yesterday’s bruise, wringing her hands

  Like the fly in Issa’s famous haiku.

  Outdoors, their “lawn” (gravel dyed green) and view:

  Other pastel, gadget-run bungalows

  Housing, you might expect, the personnel

  Of some top-secret, top-priority

  Project an artificial hill due West

  Camouflages, deceiving nobody.

  So far they’ve escaped the worst, or have they?—

  These two old people at each other’s gnarled,

  Loveless mercy. Yet David now evokes

  Moments of broadest after-supper light

  Before talk show or moon walk, when at length

  The detergent and the atrocity

  Fight it out in silence, and he half blind

  And she half deaf, serenely holding hands

  Bask in the tinted conscience of their kind.

  And here was I, or what was left of me.

  Feared and rejoiced in, chafed against, held cheap,

  A strangeness that was us, and was not, had

  All the same allowed for its description,

  And so brought at least me these spells of odd,

  Self-effacing balance. Better to stop

  While we still can. Already I take up

  Less emotional space than a snowdrop.

  My father in his last illness complained

  Of the effect of medication on

  His real self—today Bluebeard, tomorrow

  Babbitt. Young chameleon, I used to

  Ask how on earth one got sufficiently

  Imbued with otherness. And now I see.

  Zero hour. Waiting yet again

  For someone to fix the furnace. Zero week

  Of the year’s end. Bed that keeps restlessly

  Making itself anew from lamé drifts.

  Mercury dropping. Cost of living high.

  Night has fallen in the glass studio

  Upstairs. The fire we huddle with our drinks by

  Pops and snaps. Throughout t
he empty house

  (Tenants away until the New Year) taps

  Glumly trickling keep the pipes from freezing.

  Summers ago this whole room was a garden—

  Orange tree, plumbago, fuchsia, palm;

  One of us at the piano playing his

  Gymnopédie, the other entering

  Stunned by hot news from the sundeck. Now

  The plants, the sorry few that linger, scatter

  Leaflets advocating euthanasia.

  Windows and sliding doors are wadded shut.

  A blind raised here and there, what walls us in

  Trembles with dim slides, transparencies

  Of our least motion foisted on a thereby

  Realer—falser?—night. Whichever term

  Adds its note of tension and relief.

  Downstairs, doors are locked against the thief:

  Night before last, returning from a dinner,

  We found my bedroom ransacked, lights on, loud

  Tick of alarm, the mirror off its hook

  Looking daggers at the ceiling fixture.

  A burglar here in the Enchanted Village—

  Unheard of! Not that he took anything.

  We had no television, he no taste

  For Siamese bronze or Greek embroidery.

  Except perhaps some loose change on the bureau

  Nothing we can recollect is missing.

  “Lucky boys,” declared the chief of police

  Risking a wise look at our curios.

  The threat remains, though, of there still being

  A presence in our midst, unknown, unseen,

  Unscrupulous to take what he can get.

  Next morning in my study—stranger yet—

  I found a dusty carton out of place.

  Had it been rummaged through? What could he fancy

  Lay buried here among these—oh my dear,

  Letters scrawled by my own hand unable

  To keep pace with the tempest in the cup—

  These old love-letters from the other world.

  We’ve set them down at last beside the fire.

  Are they for burning, now that the affair

  Has ended? (Has it ended?) Any day

  It’s them or the piano, says DJ.

  Who’ll ever read them over? Take this one.

  Limp, chill, it shivers in the glow, as when

  The tenor having braved orchestral fog

  First sees Brünnhilde sleeping like a log.

  Laid on the fire, it would hesitate,

  Trying to think, to feel—then the elate

  Burst of satori, plucking final sense

  Boldly from inconclusive evidence.

  And that (unless it floated, spangled ash,

  Outward, upward, one lone carp aflash

  Languorously through its habitat

  For crumbs that once upon a…) would be that.

  So, do we burn the— Wait the phone is ringing:

  Bad connection; babble of distant talk;

  No getting through. We must improve the line

  In every sense, for life. Again at nine

  Sharp above the village clock, ring-ring.

  It’s Bob the furnace man. He’s on his way.

  Will find, if not an easy-to-repair

  Short circuit, then the failure long foreseen

  As total, of our period machine.

  Let’s be downstairs, leave all this, put the light out.

  Fix a screen to the proscenium

  Still flickering. Let that carton be. Too much

  Already, here below, has met its match.

  Yet nothing’s gone, or nothing we recall.

  And look, the stars have wound in filigree

  The ancient, ageless woman of the world.

  She’s seen us. She is not particular—

  Everyone gets her injured, musical

  “Why do you no longer come to me?”

  To which there’s no reply. For here we are.

  II

  MIRABELL’S BOOKS OF NUMBER

  The three men decided they would prepare a letter to President Roosevelt, and that Einstein would sign it….Einstein’s eyes slowly moved along the two full, typewritten pages….

  “For the first time in history men will use energy that does not come from the sun,” he commented and signed.

  The scientists operated their pile for the first time on December 2, 1942. They were the first men to see matter yield its inner energy, steadily, at their will. My husband was their leader. LAURA FERMI

  CONTENTS

  0 Household decoration. The Jacksons meet new friends. A black dog in Athens. Poems of Science. Avebury visited.

  1 Their Fall retold. A glimpse of the atom. Resisting Them. Akhnaton’s experiment. Auden joins the seminar.

  2 Faust and the Five. The song Dante heard. A party in 1965. Densities and definitions. A look into the Research Lab.

  3 Black holes. Maria and the plant world. Metamorphosis of 741. Athenianism. Plato patronized. Five elemental Voices.

  4 Atlantis and after. Describing an elm. A peacock on trial. Cabel Stone. The Scribe supplants religion. Chester’s new life.

  5 Losses to the Lab. The Bible endorsed. Mining of the Scribes. Are we an atom? The No Accident clause. Green fields ahead.

  6 Days in Boston. Ephraim recollects. The dream in the ginger-pot. Maria’s fate. The red Visitor. Literary exchanges.

  7 Numbers at work. Life and death in Thebes. Nature disparaged. Luca’s prank. The peacock named. Ten final lessons begin.

  8 Apechild learns to talk. The hurricane. A Herald from the S/O/L. Robert Morse drops in. Compliments upon a silver field.

  9 Mirabell’s picnic. Wystan on Poetry. Backward looks and bargains. Another black dog. Waiting for the Angel.

  O

  Oh very well, then. Let us broach the matter

  Of the new wallpaper in Stonington.

  Readers in small towns will know the world

  Of interest rippling out from such a topic,

  Know by their own case that “small town” is

  Largely a state of mind, a medium

  Wherein suspended, microscopic figments

  —Boredom, malice, curiosity—

  Catch a steadily more revealing light.

  However. Between our dining room and stairs

  Leading to the future studio,

  From long before our time, was this ill-lit

  Shoebox of a parlor where we’d sit

  Faute de mieux, when not asleep or eating.

  It had been papered by the original people—

  Blue-on-eggshell foliage touchingly

  Mottled or torn in places—and would do

  Throughout a first phase, till the Fisherman’s

  Wife in one of us awoke requiring

  That our arrangements undergo a partial

  Turn of the screw toward grandeur. So began

  What must in retrospect be called the Age

  —Some fifteen years—of the Wrong Wallpaper.

  Still blue and white, still floral, in the shop

  Looking unexceptionably prim,

  No sooner on our walls, the buds uncurl

  In scorn. Compulsively repetitive

  Neuroses full-blown and slack-lipped, then whole

  Faces surely not intended, peer

  Forth—once seen, no question of unseeing

  That turbaned mongoloid, that toad with teeth…

  Hiding as many as we can beneath

  Pictures, in our heart of hearts we know

  Either th
ey or we will have to go.

  So we do. Into the next room—upstairs—

  To Boston—Athens! It would seem all roads

  Return us to the cell marked GO. Uncanny,

  One’s tolerance for those quotidian toads.

  .1

  The buyer of the grandest house in town

  Now makes up her mind to renovate.

  Word goes round that she is giving—giving!—

  To anyone who’ll haul it, an immense

  Victorian mirror. David Jackson’s easy

  Presence, winded by sundown, wringing wet,

  Does all the rest. Here, to this day, it stands

  Backed by shelves—not the detachable glass

  Once drawn to table for the Ouija Board;

  Under its gilded crown of palms and sphinxes,

  Exactly six feet tall like Christ our Lord

  Come to bring light, redeem from paper wastes

  By doubling it—two minuses, one plus—

  The book or figurine grown dubious.

  Next comes an evening when the Fisherman’s Wife

  Brings home from Boylston Street a 7 × 10

  Chinese carpet, which just fits. A pale

  Field. A ghostly maize in winter sun.

  The border renders in two shades of tan

  And three intensities of Prussian blue

  Overlapping cloudlets that give way

  To limber, leotarded, blue-eyed bats

  —Symbols of eternity, said the dealer.

  In short, although the walls remained a problem,

  Something was at last reflecting in

  Their midst, and something else was underfoot

  That could be looked upon without dismay.

  .2

  Another decade wound itself in slow

  Glinting coils about the status quo.

  It’s 1975 before we fling

  Them off, the carpet into our back seat,

  Ourselves through melting drifts to Hubbell’s place.

  This friend of many hands—one strums a bass

  Accompaniment, another bastes a joint,

  A third and fourth do expert needlepoint—

  Has with an idle pair put out a line

  Of his own wallpapers. Will he design

  One for us, perhaps incorporating

  Motifs from the carpet? Nothing simpler.

  He makes a sketch, a cocktail, a soufflé;