JAMES MERRILL

"Alessio and the Zinnias"

____________________

“One summer—was he eight?—

They gave him the seed packet

Along with a 2’ by 4’

Slice of the estate.

To grow, to grow—grim law

Without appeal!

He, after all, kept growing every day. . .

Now this redundant chore.

Up sprouted green enough

For the whole canton, had one know to thin it.

Michaelmas found him eye to ey

With a gang of ruffians.

Not askable indoor,

Whose gaudy, wooden attitudes

(“Like pine cones in drag”)

There was scant question of endorsing

—Much as our droll friend, their legatee,

Would rap from them over the years. For instance

Think twice before causing

Just anything to be.

Then: Hold your head high in the stinking

Throngs of kind,

Joyously assimilate the Sun,

Never wear orange or pink.”

JAMES MERRILL
“The Nihilist as Hero”
____________________

All our French poets can turn an inspired line;
who has written six passable in sequence?’
said Valéry. That was a happy day for Satan….
I want words meat-hooked from the living steer,
but a cold flame of tinfoil licks the metal log,
beautiful unchanging fire of childhood
betraying a monotony of vision….
Life by definition breeds on change,
each season we scrap new cars and wars and women.
But sometimes when I am ill or delicate,
the pinched flame of my match turns unchanging green,
a cornstalk in green tails and seeded tassel….
A nihilist wants to live in the world as is,
and yet gaze the everlasting hills to rubble.
Robert Lowell, “The Nihilist as Hero”

JAMES MERRILL - "The Octopus"

There are many monsters that a glassen surface
Restrains. And none more sinister
Than vision asleep in the eye’s tight translucence.
Rarely it seeks how to unloose
Its diamonds. Having divined how drab a prison
The purest mortal tissue is,
Rarely it wakes. Unless, coaxed out by lusters
Extraordinary, like the octopus
From the gloom of its tank half-swimming half-drifting
Toward anything fair, a handkerchief
Or child’s face dreaming near the glass, the writher
Advances in a godlike wreath
Of its own wrath. Chilled by such fragile reeling
A hundred blows of a boot-heel
Shall not quell, the dreamer wakes and hungers.
Percussive pulses, drum or gong,
Build in his skull their loud entrancement,
Volutions of a Hindu dance.
His hands move clumsily in the first conventional
Gestures of assent.
He is willing to undergo the volition and fervor
Of many fleshlike arms, observe
These in their holiness of indirection
Destroy, adore, evolve, reject—
Till on glass rigid with his own seizure
At length the sucking jewels freeze.

JAMES MERRILL - "The Black Swan"

The central hollowness is that pure winter
That does not change but is
Always brilliant ice and air.

James Merrill - “A Silence”

No coffin without nails.
This one you drive into mine
At least is golden.