When he took me on, I was his youngest poet, as Merrill had been years before. Long ago, in the eighties and nineties, Merrill and I shared an editor, Harry Ford, who seemed unconcerned that publishing poetry can be a money-losing proposition and gave our books his distinctive typographical cover designs. During my twenties and thirties, perhaps there was no living poet I admired more than Merrill, and I am drawn still to this American poet, who was said to be writing even while needing oxygen on the night before his death more than twenty-five years ago. Like his friend Elizabeth Bishop, Merrill loved Herbert’s poems and could quote them by heart. It is a poem of strong feeling, almost like a rant. In French, my name means collar, and I think immediately of the metaphysical poet George Herbert’s poem “The Collar,” published in 1633, a poem in which the fervid speaker seeks more freedom in his life. It has taken me some days to sit at his desk. Mirrors are also a motif in his poems-mirrors that remember us across the years, reflecting our beauty and dissolution alike. He was an early riser and liked to give the first hours of the day to his poems, which reflect, mirrorlike, so many of my own feelings. These must be the sounds Merrill heard, too, while working. Still, I can hear a train whistle, a foghorn, halyard lines clinking against the masts of sloops anchored in the harbor, church chimes, and bits of conversation from villagers below on Water Street. Merrill’s big desk is in a small room-in an apartment of small rooms-behind a hinged bookcase that creates a very private space. It speaks in polished, rudimentary tones with a slow tempo. Searching for the meanings of our names in French, I am distracted by a blackbird perched on the windowsill, drinking a little dew and then swaying on a nearby branch. Forty years after first meeting James Merrill at my teacher David Kalstone’s Chelsea apartment, I am sitting at his desk in Stonington, Connecticut, with his large Petit Larousse open before me. It is in the same genus as the meadowlark. The male has black feathers and a yellow beak. In French the word merle means blackbird, a dark bird of the thrush family. James Merrill with wisteria in Charlottesville, 1976.
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