THE BLACK SWAN Black on flat water past the jonquil lawns Riding, the black swan draws A private chaos warbling in its wake, Assuming, like a fourth dimension, splendor That calls the child with white ideas of swans Nearer to that green lake Where every paradox means wonder. Though the black swan's arched neck is like A question-mark on the lake, The swan outlaws all possible questioning: A thing in itself, like love, like submarine Disaster, or the first sound when we wake; And the swan-song it sings Is the huge silence of the swan. Illusion: the black swan knows how to break Through expectation, beak Aimed now at its own breast, now at its image, And move across our lives, if the lake is life, And by the gentlest turning of its neck Transform, in time, time's damage; To less than a black plume, time's grief. Enchanter: the black swan has learned to enter Sorrow's lost secret center Where like a maypole separate tragedies Are wound about a tower of ribbons, and where The central hollowness is that pure winter That does not change but is Always brilliant ice and air. Always the black swan moves on the lake; always The blond child stands to gaze As the tall emblem pivots and rides out To the opposite side, always. The child upon The bank, hands full of difficult marvels, stays Forever to cry aloud In anguish: I love the black swan. THE HOUSE Whose west walls take the sunset like a blow Will have turned the other cheek by morning, though The long night falls between, as wise men know: Wherein the wind, that daily we forgot, Comes mixed with rain and, while we seek it not, Appears against our faces to have sought The contours of a listener in night air, His profile bent as from pale windows where Soberly once he learned what houses were. Those darkening reaches, crimsoned with a dust No longer earth's, but of the vanishing West, Can stir a planet nearly dispossessed, And quicken interest in the avid vein That dyes a man's heart ruddier far than stain Of day does finial, cornice and windowpane: So that whoever strolls on his launched lawn At dusk, the hour of recompense, alone, May stumbling on a sunken boundary stone The loss of deed and structure apprehend. And we who homeless toward such houses wend May find we have dwelt elsewhere. Scholar and friend, After the twelve bright houses that each day Presume to flatter what we most display, Night is a cold house, a narrow doorway. This door to no key opens, those to brass. Behind it, warning of a deep excess, The winds are. I have entered, nevertheless, And seen the wet-faced sleepers the winds take To heart; have felt their dreadful profits break Beyond my seeing: at a glance they wake. THE COUNTRY OF A THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE to Hans Lodeizen (1924-1950) Here they all come to die, Fluent therein as in a fourth tongue. But for a young man not yet of their race It was a madness you should lie Blind in one eye, and fed By the blood of a scrubbed face; It was a madness to look down On the toy city where The glittering neutrality Of clock and chocolate and lake and cloud Made every morning somewhat Less than you could bear; And makes me cry aloud At the old masters of disease Who dangling high above you on a hair The sword that, never falling, kills Would coax you still back from that starry land Under the world, which no one sees Without a death, its finish and sharp weight Flashing in his own hand. THE LOVERS They met in loving like the hands of one Who having worked six days with creature and plant Washes his hands before the evening meal. Reflected in a basin out-of-doors The golden sky receives his hands beneath Its coldly wishing surface, washing them Of all perhaps but what of one another Each with its five felt perceptions holds: A limber warmth, fitness of palm and nail So long articulate in his mind before Plunged into happening, that all the while Water laps and loves the stirring hands His eye has leisure for the young fruit-trees And lowing beasts secure, since night is near, Pasture, lights of a distant town, and sky Molten, atilt, strewn on new water, sky In which for a last fact he dips his face And lifts it glistening: what dark distinct Reflections of his features upon gold! --Except for when each slow slight water-drop He sensed on chin and nose accumulate, Each tiny world of sky reversed and branches, Fell with its pure wealth to mar the image: World after world fallen into the sky And still so much world left when, by the fire With fingers clasped, he set in revolution Certitude and chance like strong slow thumbs; Or read from an illuminated page Of harvest, flood, motherhood, mystery: These waited, and would issue from his hands. A RENEWAL Having used every subterfuge To shake you, lies, fatigue, or even that of passion, Now I see no way but a clean break. I add that I am willing to bear the guilt. You nod assent. Autumn turns windy, huge, A clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on. We sit, watching. When I next speak Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt. UPON A SECOND MARRIAGE for H. I. P. Orchards, we linger here because Women we love stand propped in your green prisons, Obedient to such justly bending laws Each one longs to take root, Lives to confess whatever season's Pride of blossom or endeavor's fruit May to her rustling boughs have risen. Then autumn reddens the whole mind. No more, she vows, the dazzle of a year Shall woo her from your bare cage of loud wind, Promise the ring and run To burn the altar, reappear With apple blossoms for the credulous one. Orchards, we wonder that we linger here! Orchards we planted, trees we shook To learn what you were bearing, say we stayed Because one winter dusk we half-mistook Frost on a bleakened bough For blossoms, and were half-afraid To miss the old persuasion, should we go. And spring did come, and discourse made Enough of weddings to us all That, loving her for whom the whole world grows Fragrant and white, we linger to recall As down aisles of cut trees How a tall trunk's cross-section shows Concentric rings, those many marriages That life on each live thing bestows. THE CHARIOTEER OF DELPHI Where are the horses of the sun? Their master's green bronze hand, empty of all But a tangle of reins, seems less to call His horses back than to wait out their run. To cool that havoc and restore The temperance we had loved them for I have implored him, child, at your behest. Watch now, the flutings of his dress hang down From the brave patina of breast. His gentle eyes glass brown Neither attend us nor the latest one Blistered and stammering who comes to cry Village in flames and river dry, None to control the chariot And to call back the killing horses none Now that their master, eyes ashine, will not. For watch, his eyes in the still air alone Look shining and nowhere Unless indeed into our own Who are reflected there Littler than dolls wound up by a child's fear How tight, their postures only know. And loosely, watch now, the reins overflow His fist, as if once more the unsubdued Beasts shivering and docile stood Like us before him. Do you remember how A small brown pony would Nuzzle the cube of sugar from your hand? Broken from his mild reprimand In fire and fury hard upon the taste Of a sweet license, even these have raced Uncurbed in us, where fires are fanned. MIRROR I grow old under an intensity Of questioning looks. Nonsense, I try to say, I cannot teach you children How to live.--If not you, who will? Cries one of them aloud, grasping my gilded Frame till the world sways. If not you, who will? Between their visits the table, its arrangement Of Bible, fern and Paisley, all past change, Does very nicely. If ever I feel curious As to what others endure, Across the parlor you provide examples, Wide open, sunny, of everything I am Not. You embrace a whole world without once caring To set it in order. That takes thought. Out there Something is being picked. The red-and-white bandannas Go to my heart. A fine young man Rides by on horseback. Now the door shuts. Hester Confides in me her first unhappiness. This much, you see, would never have been fitted Together, but for me. Why then is it They more and more neglect me? Late one sleepless Midsummer night I strained to keep Five tapers from your breathing. No, the widowed Cousin said, let them go out . I did. The room brimmed with gray sound, all the instreaming Muslin of your dream . . . Years later now, two of the grown grandchildren Sit with novels face-down on the sill, Content to muse upon your tall transparence, Your clouds, brown fields, persimmon far And cypress near. One speaks. How superficial Appearances are! Since then, as if a fish Had broken the perfect silver of my reflectiveness, I have lapses. I suspect Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes Through the blind flaws of my mind. As days, As decades lengthen, this vision Spreads and blackens. I do not know whose it is, But I think it watches for my last silver To blister, flake, float leaf by life, each milling- Downward dumb conceit, to a standstill From which not even you strike any brilliant Chord in me, and to a faceless will, Echo of mine, I am amenable. Excerpted from Selected Poems by James Merrill All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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