"Palm Beach": Text and Notes

Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-of-War

                                                            For Tony Parigory

A mile-long vertebrate picked clean
To lofty-plumed seableached incurving ribs

Poor white the soil like talcum mixed with grit
But up came polymorphous green

No sooner fertilized than clipped
Where glimmering from buried nozzles rose

And honey gravel driveways led
To the perpetual readiness of tombs

Shellwhite outside or white-on-white
A dropping bird motif still wet

Pastel and madrepore the shuttered rooms'
Nacreous jetsam wave on wave

Having swept our late excrescences
The wens and wives away to mirrorsmoke

Place settings for the skin
Diver after dark the extra man

Drowning by candlelight whose two minds reel
How to be potent and unsexed

Worth a million and expendable
How to be everybody's dish

And not have seen through the glass visor
What would be made of him some night

By the anemone's flame chiffon gown
Like those downtown in the boutiques

By razor labia of hangers-on
To territories this or that

Tiny hideous tycoon stakes out
Empire wholly built upon albino

Slaves the fossil globules of a self-
Creating self-absorbing scheme

Giddy in scope pedantic in detail
Over which random baby gorgons

Float without perception it would seem
Whom their own purple airs inflate

And ganglia agonizingly outlive
Look out! one has been blown ashore

For tomorrow's old wet nurse to come
Ease from the dry breast and sheet in foam

*"Exactly like Egypt in the thirties," you marvel ("The Nile without Cleopatra," Henry James had said.) But across the lake West Palm Beach tells a different story. Here are garages, trailer camps, fruit stands, and TV bars. Here people actually live year round, or die—my father's buried in that old cemetery off the Interstate. Such rudiments as these make up a flat prose text, which dented fender or gouged stucco of the slash in a black forearm help, like punctuation, to render fully, finally intelligible.

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First published in Marbled Paper, (Riverside California: Rara Avis Press, 1983). Text from James Merrill: Collected Poems, ed J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. (NY: Knopf, 2001): 420-21.

you marvel: Tony Parigory. See the link at left.

wens: Merrill is perhaps referring to the air reservoir ("their own purple airs inflate") at the top of the Man-of-War as a swelling or "wen," which helps it to float. When washed ashore, its ganglia are still dangerous until, as in the last couplet, swept out to sea.

Henry James: In Chapter VII of The American Scene, James comments on "the quite saccharine sweetness of my last experience of Palm Beach" and his impression of the Southern coast: "It was a Nile, in short, without the least little implication of a Sphinx or, still more if possible, of a Cleopatra." The "you" addressed is the dedicatee of the poem, Tony Parigory. See the link to Parigory in the left margin.

anemones: Sea anemones are a group of marine, predatory animals that are named after the anemone, a terrestrial flowering plant, because of their sometimes colorful appearance. 

old cemetery: Woodlawn Cemetery, Palm Beach. See the link at left.