Here, there, swift handle pointing, letter upon
Letter taken down blind by my free hand—
At best so clumsily, those early sessions
Break off into guesswork, paraphrase.
Too much went whizzing past. We were too nice
To pause, divide the alphabetical
Gibberish into words and sentences.
Yet even the most fragmentary message—
Twice as entertaining, twice as wise
As either of its mediums—enthralled them.
Correct but cautious, that first night, we asked
Our visitor’s name, era, habitat.
EPHRAIM came the answer. A Greek Jew
Born AD 8 at XANTHOS Where was that?
In Greece WHEN WOLVES & RAVENS WERE IN ROME
(Next day the classical dictionary yielded
A Xanthos on the Asia Minor Coast.)
NOW WHO ARE U We told him. ARE U XTIANS
We guessed so. WHAT A COZY CATACOMB
Christ had WROUGHT HAVOC in his family,
ENTICED MY FATHER FROM MY MOTHERS BED
(I too had issued from a broken home—
The first of several facts to coincide.)
Later a favorite of TIBERIUS Died
AD 36 on CAPRI throttled
By the imperial guard for having LOVED
THE MONSTERS NEPHEW (sic) CALIGULA
Rapidly he went on—changing the subject?
A long incriminating manuscript
Boxed in bronze lay UNDER PORPHYRY
Beneath the deepest excavations. He
Would help us find it, but we must please make haste
Because Tiberius wanted it destroyed.
Oh? And where, we wondered of the void,
Was Tiberius these days? STAGE THREE
Why was he telling us? He’d overheard us
Talking to SIMPSON Simpson? His LINK WITH EARTH
His REPRESENTATIVE A feeble nature
All but bestial, given to violent
Short lives—one ending lately among flames
In an Army warehouse. Slated for rebirth
But not in time, said Ephraim, to prevent
The brat from wasting, just now at our cup,
Precious long distance minutes—don’t hang up!
So much facetiousness—well, we were young
And these were matters of life and death—dismayed us.
Was he a devil? His reply MY POOR
INNOCENTS left the issue hanging fire.
As it flowed on, his stream-of-consciousness
Deepened. There was a buried room, a BED
WROUGHT IN SILVER I CAN LEAD U THERE
IF If? U GIVE ME What? HA HA YR SOULS
(Another time he’ll say that he misread
Our innocence for insolence that night,
And meant to scare us.) Our eyes met. What if…
The blood’s least vessel hoisted jet-black sails.
Five whole minutes we were frightened stiff
—But after all, we weren’t that innocent.
The Rover Boys at thirty, still red-blooded
Enough not to pass up an armchair revel
And pure enough at heart to beat the devil,
Entered into the spirit, so to speak,
And said they’d leave for Capri that same week.
Pause. Then, as though we’d passed a test,
Ephraim’s whole manner changed. He brushed aside
Tiberius and settled to the task
Of answering, like an experienced guide,
Those questions we had lacked the wit to ask.
Here on Earth—huge tracts of information
Have gone into these capsules flavorless
And rhymed for easy swallowing—on Earth
We’re each the REPRESENTATIVE of a PATRON
—Are there that many patrons? YES O YES
These secular guardian angels fume and fuss
For what must seem eternity over us.
It is forbidden them to INTERVENE
Save, as it were, in the entr’acte between
One incarnation and another. Back
To school from the disastrously long vac
Goes the soul its patron crams yet once
Again with savoir vivre. Will the dunce
Never—by rote, the hundredth time round—learn
What ropes make fast that point of no return,
Among the curates and the minor mages?
Patrons at last ourselves, an upward notch
Our old ones move THEYVE BORNE IT ALL FOR THIS
And take delivery from the Abyss
Of brand-new little savage souls to watch.
One difference: with every rise in station
Comes a degree of PEACE FROM REPRESENTATION
—Odd phrase, more like a motto for abstract
Art—or for Autocracy—In fact
Our heads are spinning—From the East a light—
BUT U ARE TIRED MES CHERS SWEET DREAMS TOMORROW NIGHT
Dramatis Personae (a partial list
Which may conveniently be inserted here):
Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh), 1907–
73, the celebrated poet.
Clay, John, died 1774,
A clergyman. Now patron to DJ.
Deren, Eleanora (“Maya”),
1917–61, doyenne of our
American experimental film.
Mistress moreover of a life style not
For twenty years to seem conventional.
Fills her Village flat with sacred objects:
Dolls, drums, baubles that twirl and shimmer,
Stills from work in progress, underfoot
The latest in a lineage of big, black,
Strangely accident-prone Haitian cats.
Dresses her high-waisted, maiden-breasted
Person—russet afro, agate eyes—
In thriftshop finery. Bells on her toes,
Barefoot at parties dances. Is possessed
(Cf. her book on voodoo, Divine Horsemen)
During a ceremony (1949?)
By Erzulie the innocently lavish,
Laughing, weeping, perfume-loving queen
Among the loa, or divinities.
Farmetton, Rufus, dead of heart attack
In the Transvaal, 1925.
Previous incarnation of JM.
Ford, Kinton, 1810–43,
Editor of Pope’s works. Inquiry,
Albeit languid, has unearthed to date
No vestige of this poor infatuate
Of letters, or his book—though now we know
Whence come the couplets that bedevil so
(Ephraim, no spell for exorcising them?)
His faithful representative JM.
Jackson, Mary Fogelsong, born 1890,
DJ’s mother. Representative
Of Ayako Watanabe. Model
For “Lucy Prentiss” in JM’s lost novel.
Lodeizen, Hans, 1924–50,
Dutch poet. Author of Het Innerlijk
Behang, &c. Studies in America.
Clever, goodnatured, solitary, blond,
All to a disquieting degree.
Plays a recording of the “Spring” Sonata
One May night when JM has a fever;
Unspoken things divide them from then on.
Dies of
leukemia in Switzerland,
The country of a thousand years of peace.
At Stage One when we first get through
—And where he is denied the taste and hearing
Which are Ephraim’s privilege at Six.
(Stage by Stage the taken-leave-of senses
RETURN TO US LIKE PICTURES ON A SCREEN
GROWN SOLID THAT AT 1ST ARE MERELY SEEN)
Hans’s Stage is that of vision pure
And simple: rinse the cup with rum for him,
He cannot find his tongue, his eyes alone
Burn, filling…as this moment do my own.
Patron, that summer, to a holy terror
Known as Joselito, five years old,
On a plantation near Caracas where,
Says Ephraim, he CUTS CANE & RAISES IT
Merrill, Charles Edward, 1885–
1956, JM’s father. Representative
Of a mystic from Calcutta he dismisses
As a DAMN POOR ADMINISTRATOR Model
For “Benjamin Tanning” in The Seraglio.
Mitsotáki, Maria Demertzí,
1907–74. Described
Elsewhere (cf. “Words for Maria”). Dead
In these last months of the dictatorship.
Athens will be a duller town without her.
Pincus, Beatrice (“Betsy”) Merrill, born
1937, JM’s niece. Model
For “Ellen Prentiss Cade” in the lost novel.
Simpson, Ephraim’s representative.
Reborn as “Gopping” (1955)
And (1956) as Wendell Pincus.
“Smith, Rosamund,” character in the novel,
Later the Marchesa Santofior.
Perennially youthful, worldly, rich,
And out of sight until the close, at which
Point—but no matter, now. By degrees grows
Like all my “people” (the old Prentisses,
Their grandchild Ellen, Ellen’s husband Leo,
Joanna flying toward them through the storm)
A twilight presence. I may need her still
But Ephraim shoulders her aside. She will
Have wrinkled soon to purple fruitlessness,
Leaving the outcome anybody’s guess.
Yeats, W(illiam) B(utler), 1865–
1939, the celebrated
Poet. Author of A Vision.
Familiar spirit: Leo Africanus.
—For as it happened I had been half trying
To make sense of A Vision
When our friend dropped his bombshell: POOR OLD YEATS
STILL SIMPLIFYING
But if someone up there thought we would edit
The New Enlarged Edition,
That maze of inner logic, dogma, dates—
Ephraim, forget it.
We’d long since slept through our last talk on Thomist
Structures in Dante. Causes
Were always lost—on us. We shared the traits
Of both the dumbest
Boy in school and that past master of clauses
Whose finespun mind “no idea violates.”
Ephraim nonetheless kept on pursuing
Our education. Ignorant and lazy
Though he must have found us, he remained
Sweetness itself. We hardly tasted
The pill beneath his sugar. USE USE USE
YR BODIES & YR MINDS—instead of being
Used by them? So imperceptibly
His bromides took, I only now detect
How that thirtieth summer of mine freed me—
Freed perhaps also D—to do the homework
Fiction had optimistically assigned
To adolescence. TAKE our teacher told us
FROM SENSUAL PLEASURE ONLY WHAT WILL NOT
DURING IT BE EVEN PARTLY SPOILED
BY FEAR OF LOSING TOO MUCH This was the tone
We trusted most, a smiling Hellenistic
Lightness from beyond the grave. Each shaft
Feathered by head-turning flattery:
LONG B4 THE FORTUNATE CONJUNCTION
(David’s and mine) ALLOWED ME TO GET THRU
MAY I SAY WEVE HAD OUR EYES ON U
—On our kind hearts, good sense, imagination,
Talents! Some had BORNE FRUIT Others bore
Comparison with those the Emperor
Recruited, fine young fellows from five races,
To serve as orgy-fodder in CAPRICES
(Named for their locus classicus no doubt)
Which E, to tease our shyness, fleshes out
With dwarfs, tame leopards, ancient toothless slaves
Unmarred by gender, philtres up their sleeves;
A certain disapproving TULLIA her
Red-and-white running in the de rigueur
Post-revel bath of dry Egyptian wine…
How by the way does he look? Blond, sun-kissed,
Honey-eyed, tall. AN ARCHAEOLOGIST
MEASURED THE BONES OF GERMANICUS 1 POINT 9
METERS I WAS TALLER And what age
Does one assume in the next world? THE AGE
AT WHICH IT FIRST SEEMS CREDIBLE TO DIE
Ephraim accordingly, in our propped-up glass,
Looks AS I DID AT 22 The last
Mirrors he has used were at Versailles
In the 1780’s. I WAS ALL THE RAGE
MY 2ND COURT LIFE Mediums: d’Alençon,
The duke, and his smut-loving so-called son
BOTH CHARMERS—the old man by now at Stage
Two; the younger, twelve lives later, still a
Garbage collector SHAMELESS in Manila.
As for our patrons, we are far from certain
How influential Messrs Ford and Clay
Actually are. Oh, once the curtain
Falls, and we need help in the worst way
For the quick seamless change of body-stocking,
It’s these who come. And they’ll have much to say,
We ruefully suspect, about the play.
Viewed from the wings, what can it seem but shocking?
Manners, motives, idiom and theme
Horrify such fusty employees.
Vainly they signal us: Desist! Ugh! Please!
—All sense of play, in fact, quite lost on them.
On Ephraim not. A critic sound, we said,
As Shaw, with the edge of over nineteen hundred
Years to improve his temper. And now that Simpson
Had been again TYPECAST (Reborn? As what?
A PURPLE FORKED MALE PUKING NAMELESS THING
At GOPPING a vile crossroads God knew where—
Congratulations! NOT FOR LONG I FEAR)
Ephraim had resumed his volunteer
Work in that dimension we could neither
Visualize nor keep from trying to:
For instance (this March noon) at a fogswept
Milk-misty, opal-fiery induction
Center where, even while our ball is kept
Suavely rolling, he and his staff judge
At a glance the human jetsam each new wave
Washes their way—war, famine, revolution;
Each morning’s multitude the tough
Tendril of unquestioning love alone
Ties to dust, a strewn ancestral flesh
—Yet we whose last ties loosened, snapped like thread,
Weren’t we less noble than these untamed dead?—
Old falcon-featured men, young skin-and-bone
Grandmothers, claw raised against the flash,
Night-creatures frightened headlong, by a bare
Bright Stage, into the next vein-tangled snare.
PATRONS OF SUCH SOULS ARE FREQUENTLY
MADE SQUEAMISH PAR EXEMPLE GBS
U MENTIONED HIM TONIGHT AT 6 WITH ME
VEGETARIAN ONCE HAD TO CLAIM
A FINE BROTH OF A BOY COOKED OVER FLAME
This was the tone we trusted not one bit.
Must everything be witty? AH MY DEARS
I AM NOT LAUGHING I WILL SIMPLY NOT SHED TEARS
Flash-forward: April 1st in Purgatory,
Oklahoma. Young Temerlin takes me calling
On his chimpanzees. Raw earth reds and sky blues.
Yet where we’ve paused to catch our breath, the lake
Small and unrippling bleaches to opaque
Café-au-lait daguerreotype the world
It doubles. Stump and grassy hummock, hut,
Ramshackle dock—poor furniture
Of Miranda’s island. She is sitting huddled,
Back to us, in the one tall, dead tree.
Only when Bruno gibbering thumps the dirt
Does she turn round, and see us, and descend
To dance along the hateful water’s edge,
Making the “happy” sign. Behavior which
Allows for her no less inspiredly sudden
Spells of pure unheeding, like a Haydn
Finale marked giocoso but shot through
With silences—regret? foreknowledge? Who
Can doubt she’s one of us? She has been raised
From birth in that assumption. It appears
The plan’s to wed her—like as not, to Bruno
When both reach puberty—and determine what
Traces, if any, she will then transmit
To her own offspring, of our mother wit.
Now she’s being rowed across to us,
Making the “hurry” sign. Now, heartbeat visible
Through plum-dark breast, child-face alight
Within its skeptic, brooding mask,
Has landed. Up the low red clay brow scrambles
Flinging her whole weight—as Temerlin’s
Features disappear into one great
Openjawed kiss that threatens to go on