Henri Cole and James Merrill. {Photograph} by Dorothy Alexander, courtesy of Henri Cole.

ARRIVAL IN KEY WEST

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

The airplane’s wings made
A crucifix within the clouds;
I let issues occur.

I spend the primary evening in my room with a head chilly and fever. I sit within the jacuzzi. I cellphone James Merrill, as instructed. It’s 1993. Rudolf Nureyev is useless from AIDS. I would like a job and obtain a cellphone message from Lucie Brock-Broido about an interview at Harvard. A cat meows on her tape machine within the background. My room feels heat. A ceiling fan hums overhead. There’s sweat on my forehead. The crow of roosters jogs my memory of my youth within the South and the unruly males in whose firm I used to be reared. I consider Elizabeth Bishop’s lengthy poem “Roosters” (set in Key West) and the way she disdains their virile presence. It appeared in The New Republic in 1941 and is her conflict poem, with roosters standing in for a army presence. In a letter to her mentor Marianne Moore, she wrote that she needed “to emphasise the important baseness of militarism.” In my army household, there was actually just one model of masculinity, and I needed one thing totally different. Maybe writing poems was my very own rebellious, antimasculine act, since gender is of no consequence, solely our humanity and being alert to the key vibrations of the universe. Nonetheless,

Drawing with phrases, I
Really feel fearful, diligent, uncooked,
Abject, and needy.

BISHOP CONFERENCE

I don’t need to pay the $125 convention charge, as a result of a good friend loans me his cross. On the T-shirt desk, Merrill greets me warmly, and we examine the T-shirt sizes, holding them up in opposition to each other. “Who is aware of once we’ll have the ability to purchase one other Elizabeth Bishop T-shirt,” he quips. “Higher purchase it now!” In a reside interview, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz described Bishop as a tragic individual, and contended that melancholy and  irony are the 2 most attribute qualities of her work. Studying from his e-book The Different Voice, he explains to the viewers that the “different voice” is the quiet, inward voice of poetry, moderately than the loud, public voice of czars, prophets, and politicians. The poet and literary critic John Malcolm Brinnin moderates the dialogue carrying massive black Picasso-like eyeglass frames that make his face appear small. I can’t appear to shake my head chilly. Tissues litter my resort room “like torn-open, unanswered letters” or the outdated correspondences in Elizabeth Bishop’s nice poem “The Bight,” which was written on her thirty-seventh birthday “in the course of the journey” of her life, like Dante’s Divine Comedy. In “The Bight,” there’s something comical or “off” about nearly all the pieces—as with pelicans crashing into the water like pickaxes. Bishop’s poems remind me of Merrill’s in that they are often pressed very far. I like her childlike sensibility and unquenchable sense of surprise.

When Merrill retells Bishop’s “first soiled joke”—Q: Identify three elements of a range. A: Lifter, leg, and poker—the viewers roars with laughter. At lunch, Sandy McClatchy speaks frankly about his relationship with X, who additionally loves Y. “If he chooses Y, not less than you’ll have your self-respect,” I say, cautious of mistaking Sandy’s friendliness for friendship. If honesty creates enemies, will my flattery create associates?

With pail & shovel,
I dig dig for you, my good friend,
But stay alone.

ROCK

It’s the mid-eighties. The FDA approves a take a look at for detecting HIV within the blood. Larry Kramer’s play The Regular Coronary heart premieres in New York Metropolis. Rock Hudson dies of AIDS. I’m nearly thirty however not out of the closet to my mother and father. On the Empire Diner in Chelsea, my poetry trainer, David Kalstone, wears a good-looking black silk shirt with inexperienced corduroy pants. He’s suntanned from a trip in Venice. He asks concerning the standing of my first manuscript and I reply that it was rejected by Princeton and Yale; then he recounts how tough it was for Elizabeth Bishop to discover a writer for her first e-book. When James Laughlin supplied to publish it at New Instructions, she turned him down as a result of she thought his provide was motivated by the necessity for a girl on his listing. “I’m glad she turned him down,” I say. Although it will be 5 extra years earlier than she’d have one other provide, her e-book, North & South, was improved by the wait. I really feel comforted when David tells me to be affected person. Life occurs when it occurs. He talks enthusiastically about Merrill’s new lengthy poem “Bronze” concerning the Riace bronzes—the 2 full-size Greek bronze statues of bare bearded warriors just lately found off the Calabrian coast. It’s a bitter poem concerning the lack of youth, the decline of Eros, and the battered Earth (“Nature / Is useless, or quickly might be”).

It pricks: viper of
Reminiscence—a spark creates
A psychological bon hearth.

TEARS

It’s 1986. David is useless of AIDS at fifty-three. A million People have been contaminated with the virus. In a flood of tears, Merrill writes in his diary: “Sandy on the cellphone. They stood round earlier than calling the authorities. Maybe a final signal of life … ? Then from exterior the room come excessive uncontrollable sobs … it was Jacques [, his caregiver], locked within the lavatory. He had come to really feel a part of the household + now he must discover a new affected person.” Jacques watches from above as David’s shrouded physique is loaded right into a black van parked beneath. Elsewhere in his diary, Merrill writes: “The Northern kudzu which these final years has begun to festoon and strangle bushes and so forth. hereabouts is an oriental bittersweet. Onerous to cease as soon as its foot is within the door. Delectable huge purple berries guarantee its dissemination by birds. A form of vegetable AIDS.” I’m thirty and have revealed my first e-book, which exhibits the affect of Moore, Bishop, and Merrill. A few of David’s stays are combined with earth and added to the morning glories, rosebush, and golden rain tree on Merrill’s Stonington terrace. The remainder are taken in a dinghy and dispersed within the harbor, making a “man-sized cloud of white” at the hours of darkness inexperienced sea.

The second passes
However the damage stays—a home
With no home windows/doorways.

SANTOS

December, 1992: I meet Merrill on the entrance porch of his Elizabeth Avenue home in Key West. He’s carrying a wide-brimmed straw hat, free cotton pants, and Birkenstock sandals. His keys—hooked on a belt loop—jingle as we stroll to the general public library e-book sale and browse leisurely. He tells me that the books are twenty-five cents every after which apologizes when he discovers that they’re thirty cents. He buys Byron in Italy, by Muriel Spark, and an English/French dictionary (to translate a Victor Hugo sonnet). Strolling side-by-side alongside the sleepy streets, I inform him he appears terrific, and he says he has give up consuming and smoking—one behavior didn’t make sense with out the opposite. At a small Spanish restraurant the place we cut up rice and beans with fried plantains, our dialog is private moderately than gossipy. He tells me his associate is in a Trappist monastery close to Atlanta and main a sober life after two journeys out West to a clinic. They plan to spend the winter collectively in New York. He’s dedicated to this one final effort at saving the connection after what he describes as two hellish years. From a little bit shelf over the doorway, dusty collectible figurines of saints look down upon us sympathetically.

You have to relinquish
Your vendettas or you’ll
Be destroyed by them

CATS

A lazy grey cat stretches throughout the desk the place I’m writing. He wears a flea collar, so he should belong to any person. Maybe it’s good to belong to any person. In 1986, 9 years earlier than his demise, Merrill found that he was a service of the incurable virus. In his diary, he practices what he would possibly say to his associate: “I can’t insult you by observing that you’re free to depart me—that we’re free to depart each other. There is no such thing as a approach of understanding whether or not this situation involves me from you, or—ought to your take a look at be constructive—vice versa … We could also be in for some mutual recrimination, although neither will be construed as ‘responsible.’” He writes a little bit verse:

After lengthy years of celibacy, I
Welcomed you into my life. Fifteen months later,
This. No ripple of astonishment. What face
Ought to demise put on if not that of good love?

It hasn’t been lengthy since David’s demise. Many many People are contaminated. Roy Cohn, the chief counsel to Senator McCarthy throughout his hearings and investigations, dies of problems from AIDS at age fifty-nine. HIV is adopted because the title of the retrovirus. I’m spending evenings at St. Vincent’s Hospital within the West Village with my good friend Invoice, whose robust legs are marked by Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. Merrill writes his poem “Farewell Efficiency,” an elegy for David, with its unforgettable opening line: “Artwork. It cures affliction.” I actually expertise no sense of remedy when I’m writing. Principally I’ve the alternative feeling, as a result of I discover the act of writing binds me to my emotions. However I’m drawn to Merrill’s thought: Would possibly the writing itself nonetheless have an invigorating impact—regardless of its sorrowful content material—as a result of the hand writes the correct phrases in the correct order and triumphantly assembles language into artwork?

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

MIRROR

In Merrill’s yard, a large mirror leans in opposition to the excessive fence, making an eerie duplicate of the pool setting. The mirror is rusty, with Spanish moss dripping over its high edge. I bear in mind all of the mirrors in Merrill’s poems wherein we acknowledge totally different variations of ourselves. Merrill speaks with candor about his relationships and describes himself as a caretaker. I ask if coming from a damaged residence makes us this fashion. He appears to really feel guilt concerning the scenario wherein he finds himself. He tells me that as a younger man he didn’t imagine something his mother and father advised him and that if he’d been born many years later, he in all probability would have rebelled by doing medicine as so many others have achieved. He recounts his father studying to him as a baby from Gone with the Wind as if he had been studying from Ovid or Homer. Merrill is bare-chested and carrying his swim trunks. He’s about to train 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 till he cries out with aid, “It’s solely the Stonington phone invoice!”

I want him calm in
The burdens of his thoughts/coronary heart.
Calm, no simple factor.

TREATMENT

Each night, I go to Invoice at St. Vincent’s Hospital within the West Village; I put on his good-looking fisherman’s sweater. Holding his hand, I can really feel his labored breaths. Underneath the wrinkled white hospital sheet, Invoice is bare. There is no such thing as a priest current. His lips are chapped and bleeding. Our good friend Roy runs wailing down the lengthy blue hall. A nurse arrives and takes Invoice’s pulse. Pink tulips scream on the windowsill. Lower paper lions roar on the evening desk as Invoice departs. There might be no extra poisonous therapies with debilitating unintended effects. After Merrill is identified with ARC (AIDS-related advanced), he writes a good friend, “We’re not taking any of the antiviral medicine; so poisonous says our nutritionist. As a substitute the latter has began me on peroxide remedy (1% meals grade peroxide to 99% pure water, aloe vera, and so forth.).” That is regarded as a innocent remedy, in comparison with AZT, although it’s sadly confirmed ineffective. A yr passes; Merrill feels stronger and is ready to run errands within the neighborhood due, he says, “to a deadly treatment. Something is healthier than the Dwelling Dying I used to be slipping into.” AZT has changed his peroxide remedy. Just a few months later, AZT is changed by “a every day shot of Epogen,” an experimental remedy as costly, based on Merrill, as a cocaine behavior. His care is all “Trial & Error.” He asks himself if he dies what’s going to grow to be of his lover? “I appear to be his destiny,” Merrill tells his oldest good friend, Freddy Buechner.

Achingly human,
He hath achieved what he might. Liked
And loving. By no means

Thoughts that his physique
Doesn’t belong to him. Fact
And sweetness got here out.

TRANSPARENT

Possibly anyone who can grow to be clear to expertise and articulate it honestly and with out distortion is a poet. Even when the info are scary or horrible, what comes out, if true, may be lovely. Possibly poets are like bees visiting a thousand flowers whereas carrying round a load of nectar—with the world and the poet coming collectively within the single redemptive act of the poem, just like the creation of scrumptious honey. Even when the poem feels like despair, it isn’t, as a result of feeling has been given a brand new substance in a triumphant act. Definitely, Merrill is triumphantly current in his final poems (revealed posthumously): “Christmas Tree,” “Koi,” and “Days of 1994.” There’s a unusual sweetness and acceptance on this work that anticipates and displays heroically upon his personal demise.

To let the previous go
Fully isn’t painless
With ‘mortal gravel.’

DOLPHINS

I’m sixty-eight—the age of Bishop and Merrill after they departed. All of us hope to be like dolphins operating over the silvery froths away from demise. Scripting this now, I image Merrill sitting within the bentwood rocking chair chez Kalstone at our first assembly. I’m simply twenty-four and a scholar in David’s poetry seminar at Columbia, the place I’ve been studying Merrill’s poems for the primary time with ardor. David has requested me to housesit whereas he’s away for the summer season and is giving me directions. Daylight pours by way of the backyard home windows into the lounge, the place Merrill is rocking gently as he tells me his mom, like me, is from the South. A spiral staircase ascends into David’s workplace, the place I’ll spend many hours studying by way of his library. As I write this now,

reminiscence rushes
ahead, as if the important thing to
all the pieces is there.

Fifteen years later, we’re sitting at a restaurant on a dock below an awning in Stonington, Connecticut. I haven’t seen Merrill in lots of months and discover him modified. His neck is roofed with white lotion. He appears skinny and his hair has gone silver. There are stray whiskers on his face. But he retains a youthful demeanor. After lunch, he asks for a journey in my powder-blue ’69 Ford Fairlane, as a result of he desires his neighbors to see him arriving in my “muscle automotive.” So we drive the brief distance to 107 Water Avenue, the place he has lived on and off for many years. His residence is three slim flights up and the entrance door is huge open. I instantly acknowledge particulars from the poems which have formed me: the dark-blue-and-white bat wallpaper, the Ouija board tower room, the bust on the terrace. The residence is in disarray, with piles of books, correspondence, and dishes left right here and there. Within the kitchen, a heap of unwashed dishes overflows the sink, but plainly that is no impediment to his creativeness, as a result of he tells me he has simply completed a poem, his first since handing over A Scattering of Salts. We unfold a map out over the eating desk’s shiny milk glass to find out the most effective path to northwestern Connecticut, the place he plans to go to his lover, whose Jack Russell is known as Cosmo, although based on Merrill, as soon as the canine is neutered, his title might be modified to Cosmo-not.

Sure, we had been as soon as free,
Like youngsters with imagi-
Nations. Now we’re

Like climbing roses
That can’t avert our eyes
From the sunshine touching

The crust of the Earth.

Henri Cole has revealed eleven collections of poetry, most just lately Gravity and Heart: Chosen Sonnets, and a memoir, Orphic Paris. His assortment The Different Love might be revealed in July.

James Merrill’s diaries and letters quoted courtesy of the James Merrill Papers, Julian Edison Division of Particular Collections, Washington College Libraries. Copyright the Literary Property of James Merrill at Washington College.