Light into the olive entered
And was oil.  Rain made the huge pale stones
Shine from within.  The moon turned his hair white
Who next stepped from between the columns,
Shielding his eyes.  All through
The countryside were old ideas
Found lying open to the elements.
Of the gods’ houses only
A minor premise here and there
Would be balancing the heaven of fixed stars
Upon a Doric capital.  The rest
Lay spilled, their fluted drums half sunk in cyclamen
Or deep in water’s biting clarity
Which just barely upheld me
The next week, when I sailed for home.
But where is home—these walls?
These limbs? The very spaniel underfoot
Races in sleep, toward what?
It is autumn. I did not invite
Those guests, windy and brittle, who drink my liquor.
Returning from a walk I find
The bottles filled with spleen, my room itself
Smeared by reflection onto the far hemlocks.
I some days flee in dream
Back to the exposed porch of the maidens
Only to find my great-reat-grandmothers
Erect there, peering
Into a globe of red Bohemian glass.
As it swells and sinks, I call up
Graces, Furies, Fates, removed
To my country’s warm, lit halls, with rivets force
through drapery and nothing left to bear.
They seem pious to know
What holds up heaven nowadays.
I start explaining how in that vast fire
Were other irons—well, Art, Public Spirit,
Ignorance, Economics, Love of Self,
Hatred of Self, a hundred more,
Each burning to be felt, each dedicated
To sparing us the worst; how I distrust them
As I should have done those ladies; how I want
Essentials: salt, wine, olive, the light, the scream—
No! I have scarcely named you,
And look, in a flash you stand full-grown before me,
Row upon row, Essentials,
Dressed like your sister caryatids
Or tombstone angels jealous of their dead,
With undulant coiffures, lips weathered, cracked by grime,
And faultless eyes gone blank beneath the immense
Zinc and gunmetal northern sky…
Stay then.  Perhaps the system
Calls for spirits.  This first glass I down
To the last time
I ate and drank in that old world.  May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

-James Merrill