Nights and Days

ARRIVAL IN KEY WEST

I arrive in the afternoon. My baggage is lost in Orlando. It’s Epiphany.

The airplane’s wings made
A crucifix in the clouds;
I let things happen.

I spend the first night in my room with a head cold and fever. I sit in the jacuzzi. I phone James Merrill, as instructed. It is 1993. Rudolf Nureyev is dead from AIDS. I need a job and receive a phone message from Lucie Brock-Broido about an interview at Harvard. A cat meows on her tape machine in the background. My room feels warm. A ceiling fan hums overhead. There is sweat on my brow. The crow of roosters reminds me of my youth in the South and the unruly men in whose company I was reared. I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s long poem “Roosters” (set in Key West) and how she disdains their virile presence. It appeared in The New Republic in 1941 and is her war poem, with roosters standing in for a military presence. In a letter to her mentor Marianne Moore, she wrote that she wanted “to emphasize the essential baseness of militarism.” In my military family, there was really only one version of masculinity, and I wanted something different. Perhaps writing poems was my own rebellious, antimasculine act, since gender is of no consequence, only our humanity and being alert to the secret vibrations of the universe. Still,

Drawing with words, I
Feel fearful, diligent, raw,
Abject, and needy.

 

BISHOP CONFERENCE

I don’t have to pay the $125 conference fee, because a friend loans me his pass. At the T-shirt table, Merrill greets me warmly, and we compare the T-shirt sizes, holding them up against one another. “Who knows when we’ll be able to buy another Elizabeth Bishop T-shirt,” he quips. “Better buy it now!” In a live interview, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz described Bishop as a sad person, and contended that melancholy and  irony are the two most characteristic qualities of her work. Reading from his book The Other Voice, he explains to the audience that the “other voice” is the quiet, inward voice of poetry, rather than the loud, public voice of czars, prophets, and politicians. The poet and literary critic John Malcolm Brinnin moderates the discussion wearing large black Picasso-like eyeglass frames that make his face seem small. I can’t seem to shake my head cold. Tissues litter my hotel room “like torn-open, unanswered letters” or the old correspondences in Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem “The Bight,” which was written on her thirty-seventh birthday “in the middle of the journey” of her life, like Dante’s Divine Comedy. In “The Bight,” there is something comical or “off” about almost everything—as with pelicans crashing into the water like pickaxes. Bishop’s poems remind me of Merrill’s in that they can be pressed very far. I adore her childlike sensibility and unquenchable sense of wonder.

When Merrill retells Bishop’s “first dirty joke”—Q: Name three parts of a stove. A: Lifter, leg, and poker—the audience roars with laughter. At lunch, Sandy McClatchy speaks frankly about his relationship with X, who also loves Y. “If he chooses Y, at least you’ll have your self-respect,” I say, wary of mistaking Sandy’s friendliness for friendship. If honesty creates enemies, will my flattery create friends?

With pail & shovel,
I dig dig for you, my friend,
Yet remain alone.

 

ROCK

It’s the mid-eighties. The FDA approves a test for detecting HIV in the blood. Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart premieres in New York City. Rock Hudson dies of AIDS. I’m almost thirty but not out of the closet to my parents. At the Empire Diner in Chelsea, my poetry teacher, David Kalstone, wears a handsome black silk shirt with green corduroy pants. He is suntanned from a vacation in Venice. He asks about the status of my first manuscript and I reply that it was rejected by Princeton and Yale; then he recounts how difficult it was for Elizabeth Bishop to find a publisher for her first book. When James Laughlin offered to publish it at New Directions, she turned him down because she thought his offer was motivated by the need for a woman on his list. “I’m glad she turned him down,” I say. Though it would be five more years before she’d have another offer, her book, North & South, was improved by the wait. I feel comforted when David tells me to be patient. Life happens when it happens. He talks enthusiastically about Merrill’s new long poem “Bronze” about the Riace bronzes—the two full-size Greek bronze statues of naked bearded warriors recently discovered off the Calabrian coast. It’s a bitter poem about the loss of youth, the decline of Eros, and the battered Earth (“Nature / Is dead, or soon will be”).

It pricks: viper of
Memory—a spark creates
A mental bon fire.

 

TEARS

It’s 1986. David is dead of AIDS at fifty-three. One million Americans have been infected with the virus. In a flood of tears, Merrill writes in his diary: “Sandy on the phone. They stood around before calling the authorities. Perhaps a last sign of life … ? Then from outside the room come high uncontrollable sobs … it was Jacques [, his caregiver], locked in the bathroom. He had come to feel part of the family + now he would have to find a new patient.” Jacques watches from above as David’s shrouded body is loaded into a black van parked below. Elsewhere in his diary, Merrill writes: “The Northern kudzu which these last years has begun to festoon and strangle trees etc. hereabouts is an oriental bittersweet. Hard to stop once its foot is in the door. Delectable big red berries ensure its dissemination by birds. A kind of vegetable AIDS.” I am thirty and have published my first book, which shows the influence of Moore, Bishop, and Merrill. Some of David’s remains are mixed with earth and added to the morning glories, rosebush, and golden rain tree on Merrill’s Stonington terrace. The rest are taken in a dinghy and dispersed in the harbor, creating a “man-sized cloud of white” in the dark green sea.

The moment passes
But the hurt remains—a house
With no windows/doors.

 

SANTOS

December, 1992: I meet Merrill on the front porch of his Elizabeth Street house in Key West. He is wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, loose cotton pants, and Birkenstock sandals. His keys—hooked on a belt loop—jingle as we walk to the public library book sale and browse leisurely. He tells me that the books are twenty-five cents each and then apologizes when he discovers that they are thirty cents. He buys Byron in Italy, by Muriel Spark, and an English/French dictionary (to translate a Victor Hugo sonnet). Walking side-by-side along the sleepy streets, I tell him he looks terrific, and he says he has quit drinking and smoking—one habit didn’t make sense without the other. At a small Spanish restraurant where we split rice and beans with fried plantains, our conversation is personal rather than gossipy. He tells me his partner is in a Trappist monastery near Atlanta and leading a sober life after two trips out West to a clinic. They plan to spend the winter together in New York. He is committed to this one last effort at saving the relationship after what he describes as two hellish years. From a little shelf over the doorway, dusty figurines of saints look down upon us sympathetically.

You must relinquish
Your vendettas or you will
Be destroyed by them

 

CATS

A lazy gray cat stretches across the table where I am writing. He wears a flea collar, so he must belong to somebody. Perhaps it is good to belong to somebody. In 1986, nine years before his death, Merrill discovered that he was a carrier of the incurable virus. In his diary, he practices what he might say to his partner: “I will not insult you by observing that you are free to leave me—that we are free to leave one another. There is no way of knowing whether this condition comes to me from you, or—should your test be positive—vice versa … We may be in for some mutual recrimination, even though neither can be construed as ‘guilty.’” He writes a little verse:

After long years of celibacy, I
Welcomed you into my life. Fifteen months later,
This. No ripple of astonishment. What face
Should death wear if not that of perfect love?

It hasn’t been long since David’s death. Many many Americans are infected. Roy Cohn, the chief counsel to Senator McCarthy during his hearings and investigations, dies of complications from AIDS at age fifty-nine. HIV is adopted as the name of the retrovirus. I am spending evenings at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village with my friend Bill, whose strong legs are marked by Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. Merrill writes his poem “Farewell Performance,” an elegy for David, with its unforgettable opening line: “Art. It cures affliction.” I myself experience no sense of cure when I am writing. Mostly I have the opposite feeling, because I find the act of writing binds me to my feelings. But I am drawn to Merrill’s idea: Might the writing itself still have an invigorating effect—despite its sorrowful content—because the hand writes the right words in the right order and triumphantly assembles language into art?

Writing on paper
The artist commemorates
Himself. Like a god.

 

MIRROR

In Merrill’s backyard, a giant mirror leans against the high fence, making an eerie duplicate of the pool setting. The mirror is rusty, with Spanish moss dripping over its top edge. I remember all the mirrors in Merrill’s poems in which we recognize different versions of ourselves. Merrill speaks with candor about his relationships and describes himself as a caretaker. I ask if coming from a broken home makes us this way. He seems to feel guilt about the situation in which he finds himself. He tells me that as a young man he didn’t believe anything his parents told him and that if he’d been born decades later, he probably would have rebelled by doing drugs as so many others have done. He recounts his father reading to him as a child from Gone with the Wind as if he were reading from Ovid or Homer. Merrill is bare-chested and wearing his swim trunks. He is about to exercise on his cross-country-skiing machine. Then the mail arrives and a letter falls between the cedar slats of the terrace, so we get down on our knees and peer into the darkness until he cries out with relief, “It’s only the Stonington telephone bill!”

I wish him calm in
The burdens of his mind/heart.
Calm, no easy thing.

 

TREATMENT

Every evening, I visit Bill at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village; I wear his handsome fisherman’s sweater. Holding his hand, I can feel his labored breaths. Under the wrinkled white hospital sheet, Bill is naked. There is no priest present. His lips are chapped and bleeding. Our friend Roy runs wailing down the long blue corridor. A nurse arrives and takes Bill’s pulse. Red tulips scream on the windowsill. Cut paper lions roar on the night table as Bill departs. There will be no more toxic therapies with debilitating side effects. After Merrill is diagnosed with ARC (AIDS-related complex), he writes a friend, “We’re not taking any of the antiviral drugs; so toxic says our nutritionist. Instead the latter has started me on peroxide therapy (1% food grade peroxide to 99% pure water, aloe vera, etc.).” This is thought to be a harmless treatment, compared to AZT, though it is sadly proven useless. A year passes; Merrill feels stronger and is able to run errands in the neighborhood due, he says, “to a lethal medication. Anything is better than the Living Death I was slipping into.” AZT has replaced his peroxide treatment. A few months later, AZT is replaced by “a daily shot of Epogen,” an experimental treatment as expensive, according to Merrill, as a cocaine habit. His care is all “Trial & Error.” He asks himself if he dies what will become of his lover? “I seem to be his fate,” Merrill tells his oldest friend, Freddy Buechner.

Achingly human,
He hath done what he could. Loved
And loving. Never

Mind that his body
Doesn’t belong to him. Truth
And beauty came out.

TRANSPARENT

Maybe anybody who can become transparent to experience and articulate it truthfully and without distortion is a poet. Even if the facts are scary or horrible, what comes out, if true, might be beautiful. Maybe poets are like bees visiting a thousand flowers while carrying around a load of nectar—with the world and the poet coming together in the single redemptive act of the poem, like the creation of delicious honey. Even if the poem sounds like despair, it isn’t, because feeling has been given a new substance in a triumphant act. Certainly, Merrill is triumphantly present in his last poems (published posthumously): “Christmas Tree,” “Koi,” and “Days of 1994.” There is a strange sweetness and acceptance in this work that anticipates and reflects heroically upon his own death.

To let the past go
Completely isn’t painless
With ‘mortal gravel.’

DOLPHINS

I am sixty-eight—the age of Bishop and Merrill when they departed. We all hope to be like dolphins running over the silvery froths away from death. Writing this now, I picture Merrill sitting in the bentwood rocking chair chez Kalstone at our first meeting. I am just twenty-four and a student in David’s poetry seminar at Columbia, where I have been reading Merrill’s poems for the first time with ardor. David has asked me to housesit while he is away for the summer and is giving me instructions. Sunlight pours through the garden windows into the living room, where Merrill is rocking gently as he tells me his mother, like me, is from the South. A spiral staircase ascends into David’s office, where I will spend many hours reading through his library. As I write this now,

memory rushes
forward, as if the key to
everything is there.

Fifteen years later, we are sitting at a restaurant on a dock under an awning in Stonington, Connecticut. I haven’t seen Merrill in many months and find him changed. His neck is covered with white lotion. He seems thin and his hair has gone silver. There are stray whiskers on his face. Yet he retains a youthful demeanor. After lunch, he asks for a ride in my powder-blue ’69 Ford Fairlane, because he wants his neighbors to see him arriving in my “muscle car.” So we drive the short distance to 107 Water Street, where he has lived off and on for decades. His apartment is three narrow flights up and the front door is wide open. I immediately recognize details from the poems that have shaped me: the dark-blue-and-white bat wallpaper, the Ouija board tower room, the bust on the terrace. The apartment is in disarray, with piles of books, correspondence, and dishes left here and there. In the kitchen, a heap of unwashed dishes overflows the sink, yet plainly this is no obstacle to his imagination, because he tells me he has just finished a poem, his first since turning in A Scattering of Salts. We spread a map out over the dining table’s shiny milk glass to determine the best route to northwestern Connecticut, where he plans to visit his lover, whose Jack Russell is named Cosmo, though according to Merrill, once the dog is neutered, his name will be changed to Cosmo-not.

Yes, we were once free,
Like children with imagi-
Nations. Now we are

Like climbing roses
That cannot avert our eyes
From the light touching

The crust of the Earth.

 

Henri Cole has published eleven collections of poetry, most recently Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, and a memoir, Orphic Paris. His collection The Other Love will be published in July.

James Merrill’s diaries and letters quoted courtesy of the James Merrill Papers, Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, Washington University Libraries. Copyright the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University.

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