{"id":170522,"date":"2025-04-22T10:00:39","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T14:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=170522"},"modified":"2025-04-22T17:48:31","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T21:48:31","slug":"nights-and-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/04\/22\/nights-and-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Nights and Days"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Henri Cole and James Merrill. Photograph by Dorothy Alexander, courtesy of Henri Cole.<\/p><\/div>\n


\nARRIVAL IN KEY WEST<\/strong><\/p>\n

I arrive in the afternoon. My baggage is lost in Orlando. It\u2019s Epiphany.<\/p>\n

The airplane\u2019s wings made
\nA crucifix in the clouds;
\nI let things happen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/small>. 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\u2019s long poem \u201cRoosters\u201d (set in Key West) and how she disdains their virile presence. It appeared in The New Republic<\/em> 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 \u201cto emphasize the essential baseness of militarism.\u201d 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,<\/p>\n

Drawing with words, I
\nFeel fearful, diligent, raw,
\nAbject, and needy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

BISHOP CONFERENCE<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t 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\u2019ll be able to buy another Elizabeth Bishop T-shirt,\u201d he quips. \u201cBetter buy it now!\u201d In a live interview, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz described Bishop as a sad person, and contended that melancholy and \u00a0irony are the two most characteristic qualities of her work. Reading from his book The Other Voice<\/em>, he explains to the audience that the \u201cother voice\u201d 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\u2019t seem to shake my head cold. Tissues litter my hotel room \u201clike torn-open, unanswered letters\u201d or the old correspondences in Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s great poem \u201cThe Bight,\u201d which was written on her thirty-seventh birthday \u201cin the middle of the journey\u201d of her life, like Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy<\/em>. In \u201cThe Bight,\u201d there is something comical or \u201coff\u201d about almost everything\u2014as with pelicans crashing into the water like pickaxes. Bishop\u2019s poems remind me of Merrill\u2019s in that they can be pressed very far. I adore her childlike sensibility and unquenchable sense of wonder.<\/p>\n

When Merrill retells Bishop\u2019s \u201cfirst dirty joke\u201d\u2014Q: Name three parts of a stove. A: Lifter, leg, and poker\u2014the audience roars with laughter. At lunch, Sandy McClatchy speaks frankly about his relationship with X, who also loves Y. \u201cIf he chooses Y, at least you\u2019ll have your self-respect,\u201d I say, wary of mistaking Sandy\u2019s friendliness for friendship. If honesty creates enemies, will my flattery create friends?<\/p>\n

With pail & shovel,
\nI dig dig for you, my friend,
\nYet remain alone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

ROCK<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the mid-eighties. The FDA approves a test for detecting HIV in the blood. Larry Kramer\u2019s play The Normal Heart<\/em> premieres in New York City. Rock Hudson dies of AIDS<\/small>. I\u2019m 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. \u201cI\u2019m glad she turned him down,\u201d I say. Though it would be five more years before she\u2019d have another offer, her book, North & South<\/em>, 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\u2019s new long poem \u201cBronze\u201d about the Riace bronzes\u2014the 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 (\u201cNature \/ Is dead, or soon will be<\/em>\u201d).<\/p>\n

It pricks: viper of
\nMemory\u2014a spark creates
\nA mental bon fire.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

TEARS<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s 1986. David is dead of AIDS<\/small> at fifty-three. One million Americans have been infected with the virus. In a flood of tears, Merrill writes in his diary: \u201cSandy on the phone. They stood around before calling the authorities. Perhaps a last sign of life \u2026 ? Then from outside the room come high uncontrollable sobs \u2026 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.\u201d Jacques watches from above as David\u2019s shrouded body is loaded into a black van parked below. Elsewhere in his diary, Merrill writes: \u201cThe 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<\/small>.\u201d I am thirty and have published my first book, which shows the influence of Moore, Bishop, and Merrill. Some of David\u2019s remains are mixed with earth and added to the morning glories, rosebush, and golden rain tree on Merrill\u2019s Stonington terrace. The rest are taken in a dinghy and dispersed in the harbor, creating a \u201cman-sized cloud of white\u201d in the dark green sea.<\/p>\n

The moment passes
\nBut the hurt remains\u2014a house
\nWith no windows\/doors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

SANTOS<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014hooked on a belt loop\u2014jingle 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<\/em>, 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\u2014one habit didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

You must relinquish
\nYour vendettas or you will
\nBe destroyed by them<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

CATS<\/strong><\/p>\n

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: \u201cI will not insult you by observing that you are free to leave me\u2014that we are free to leave one another. There is no way of knowing whether this condition comes to me from you, or\u2014should your test be positive\u2014vice versa \u2026 We may be in for some mutual recrimination, even though neither can be construed as \u2018guilty.\u2019\u201d He writes a little verse:<\/p>\n

After long years of celibacy, I
\nWelcomed you into my life. Fifteen months later,
\nThis. No ripple of astonishment. What face
\nShould death wear if not that of perfect love?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It hasn\u2019t been long since David\u2019s death. Many many Americans are infected. Roy Cohn, the chief counsel to Senator McCarthy during his hearings and investigations, dies of complications from AIDS<\/small> at age fifty-nine. HIV is adopted as the name of the retrovirus. I am spending evenings at St. Vincent\u2019s Hospital in the West Village with my friend Bill, whose strong legs are marked by Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. Merrill writes his poem \u201cFarewell Performance,\u201d an elegy for David, with its unforgettable opening line: \u201cArt. It cures affliction.\u201d 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\u2019s idea: Might the writing itself still have an invigorating effect\u2014despite its sorrowful content\u2014because the hand writes the right words in the right order and triumphantly assembles language into art?<\/p>\n

Writing on paper
\nThe artist commemorates
\nHimself. Like a god.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

MIRROR<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Merrill\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t believe anything his parents told him and that if he\u2019d 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<\/em> 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, \u201cIt\u2019s only the Stonington telephone bill!\u201d<\/p>\n

I wish him calm in
\nThe burdens of his mind\/heart.
\nCalm, no easy thing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

TREATMENT<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every evening, I visit Bill at St. Vincent\u2019s Hospital in the West Village; I wear his handsome fisherman\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/small>-related complex), he writes a friend, \u201cWe\u2019re 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.).\u201d 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, \u201cto a lethal medication. Anything is better than the Living Death I was slipping into.\u201d AZT has replaced his peroxide treatment. A few months later, AZT is replaced by \u201ca daily shot of Epogen,\u201d an experimental treatment as expensive, according to Merrill, as a cocaine habit. His care is all \u201cTrial & Error.\u201d He asks himself if he dies what will become of his lover? \u201cI seem to be his fate,\u201d Merrill tells his oldest friend, Freddy Buechner.<\/p>\n

Achingly human,
\nHe hath done what he could. Loved
\nAnd loving. Never<\/p>\n

Mind that his body
\nDoesn\u2019t belong to him. Truth
\nAnd beauty came out.<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n

TRANSPARENT<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014with 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\u2019t, because feeling has been given a new substance in a triumphant act. Certainly, Merrill is triumphantly present in his last poems (published posthumously): \u201cChristmas Tree,\u201d \u201cKoi,\u201d and \u201cDays of 1994.\u201d There is a strange sweetness and acceptance in this work that anticipates and reflects heroically upon his own death.<\/p>\n

To let the past go
\nCompletely isn\u2019t painless
\nWith \u2018mortal gravel.’<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n

DOLPHINS<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am sixty-eight\u2014the 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\u2019s poetry seminar at Columbia, where I have been reading Merrill\u2019s 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\u2019s office, where I will spend many hours reading through his library. As I write this now,<\/p>\n

memory rushes
\nforward, as if the key to
\neverything is there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fifteen years later, we are sitting at a restaurant on a dock under an awning in Stonington, Connecticut. I haven\u2019t 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 \u201969 Ford Fairlane, because he wants his neighbors to see him arriving in my \u201cmuscle car.\u201d 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<\/em> Salts. <\/em>We spread a map out over the dining table\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Yes, we were once free,
\nLike children with imagi-
\nNations. Now we are<\/p>\n

Like climbing roses
\nThat cannot avert our eyes
\nFrom the light touching<\/p>\n

The crust of the Earth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Henri Cole has published eleven collections of poetry, most recently <\/em>Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, and a memoir, <\/em>Orphic Paris. His collection <\/em>The Other Love\u00a0will be published in July.<\/em><\/p>\n

James Merrill\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAt the T-shirt table, Merrill greets me warmly, and we compare the T-shirt sizes, holding them up against one another. \u2018Who knows when we\u2019ll be able to buy another Elizabeth Bishop T-shirt,\u2019 he quips. \u2018Better buy it now!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1465,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-170522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNights and Days by Henri Cole<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 22, 2025 \u2013 \u201cAt the T-shirt table, Merrill greets me warmly, and we compare the T-shirt sizes, holding them up against one another. \u2018Who knows when we\u2019ll be able to buy another Elizabeth Bishop T-shirt,\u2019 he quips. \u2018Better buy it 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