I was looking through some old threads and have decided to revive this one. Merrill is a big hero of mine, for his grace and fleetness of foot, his camp wry take. Of course he could well afford to be camp and wry, but I think he was something really special.
The Kimono
When I returned from lovers' lane
My hair was white as snow.
Joy, incomprehension, pain
I'd seen like seasons come and go.
How I got home again,
Frozen half dead, perhaps you know.
You hide a smile and quote a text:
Desires unsatisfied
Persist from one life to the next.
Hearths we strip ourselves beside
Long, long ago were x'ed
On blueprints of "consuming pride".
Times out of mind, the bubble-gleam
To our charred level drew
April back. A sudden beam...
— Keep talking while I change into
The pattern of a stream
Bordered with rushes white on blue.
Many of his greatest poems are just too long to post up here. The amazing "Lost in Translation" is worth reading but pages and pages too long to type in. It was Michael Donaghy who introduced me to Merrill, with "The Broken Home", a series of sonnets about his childhood and his parents, and I thought: what is this richness and detail, and how can he know so much about me? I think Merrill, though often accused of archness and even shallowness (!!), has a gift for what is emotionally true.
Here's one of them:
When my parents were younger this was a popular act:
A veiled woman would leap from an electric, wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what — the Senate or the Ritz Bar —
And bodily, at newsreel speed, attack
No matter whom — Al Smith or José María Sert
Or Clemenceau — veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled War mongerer! Pig! Give us the vote!,
And would have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt.
What had the man done? Oh, made history.
Her business (he had implied) was giving birth,
Tending the house, mending the socks.
Always that same old story —
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks.
Here's another one I love to bits:
Charles on Fire
Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances. And it was the consensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false claims),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
"Without your intellectual and spiritual
Values, man, you are sunk." No one but squared
The shoulders of their own unlovliness.
Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,
Now brought out little tumblers finely etched
He filled with amber liquor and then passed.
"Say," said the same young man, "in Paris, France,
They do it this way" — bounding to his feet
And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.
A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface. In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand
All at once gloved itself in eeriness.
The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.
KEB
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