Text of "Days of 1964"

Days of 1964

Houses, an embassy, the hospital,

Our neighborhood sun-cured if trembling still

In pools of the night’s rain . . .

Across the street that led to the center of town

A steep hill kept one company part way

Or could be climbed in twenty minutes

For some literally breathtaking views,

Framed by umbrella pines, of city and sea.

Underfoot, cyclamen, autumn crocus grew

Spangled as with fine sweat among the relics

Of good times had by all. If not Olympus,

An out-of-earshot, year-round hillside revel.

 

I brought home flowers from my climbs.

Kyria Kleo who cleans for us

Put them in water, sighing Virgin, Virgin.

Her legs hurt. She wore brown, was fat, past fifty,

And looked like a Palmyra matron

Copied in lard and horsehair. How she loved

You, me, loved us all, the bird, the cat!

I think now she was love. She sighed and glistened

All day with it, or pain, or both.

(We did not notably communicate.)

She lived nearby with her pious mother

And wastrel son. She called me her real son.

 

I paid her generously, I dare say.

Love makes one generous. Look at us. We’d known

Each other so briefly that instead of sleeping

We lay whole nights, open, in the lamplight,

And gazed, or traded stories.

 

One hour comes back – you gasping in my arms

With love, or laughter, or both,

I having just remembered and told you

What I’d looked up to see on my way downtown at noon:

poor old Kleo, her aching legs,

Trudging into the pines. I called.

Called three times before she turned.

Above a tight, skyblue sweater, her face

Was painted. Yes. Her face was painted

Clown-white, white of the moon by daylight,

Lidded with pearl, mouth a poinsettia leaf.

Eat me, pay me – the erotic mask

Worn the world over by illusion

To weddings of itself and simple need.

 

Startled mute, we had stared – was love illusion? –

And gone our ways. Next, I was crossing a square

In which a moveable outdoor market’s

Vegetables, chickens, pottery kept materializing

Through a dream-press of hagglers each at heart

Leery lest he be taken, plucked,

The bird, the flower of that November mildness,

Self lost up soft clay paths, or found, foothold,

Where the bud throbs awake

The better to be nipped, self on its knees in mud -–

Here I stopped cold, for both our sakes;

 

And calmer on my way home bought us fruit.

 

Forgive me if you read this. (And may Kyria Kleo,

Should someone ever put it into Greek

And read it aloud to her, forgive me, too.)

I had gone so long without loving,

I hardly knew what I was thinking.

 

Where I hid my face, your touch, quick, merciful,

Blindfolded me. A god breathed from my lips.

If that was illusion I wanted it to last long;

To dwell, for its daily pittance, with us there,

Cleaning and watering, sighing with love or pain.

I hoped it would climb when it needed to the heights

Even of degradation as I for one

Seemed, those days, to be always climbing

Into a world of wild

Flowers, feasting, tears­­−or was I falling, legs

Buckling, heights, depths,

Into a pool of each night’s rain?

But you were everywhere beside me, masked,

As who was not, in laughter, pain, and love.

 

Quarterly Review of Literature. 14: 1/2. (June 1966). 141-43.

Nights and Days. New York: Atheneum, 1966.

Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 2001.

From Jack W. C. Hagstrom and Bill Morgan, James Ingram Merrill: A Descriptive Bibliography (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2009).