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109 JAmes merrill from Mirabell: Books of Number Sun is rising. The cool, smalltown dawn! Now through gently breathing shades it strums The brass bed, a quick bar or two, and the long, Hushed day—August 21st—begins By whose unthinkable finale we (However often, faced with splendors, left Dutifully rapt—until, made “ours,” Pressed in a freshman Plato like wildflowers, The mummied angel slumbered) may for once Find this pure dew of expectancy Undried upon the skin. The hours change Clothes in silence. Noon. No letters. One. A highlight excommunicates the phone. Things look out at us as from a spell They themselves have woven. Young, windblown Maria with dark glasses and Gitane— Snapshot tucked in the mirror. Book by Wystan Face up among the clouds and bats, all week Open to Miranda’s villanelle. Tin bird at attention by the salt. The salt-cellar in its own right, a bisque Egg one shy bluebell embellishes, Found when we moved here, eldest of this troupe Brought up to interact, to shrug off risk At any level. Three. The hands that halt Second by second coming round ablaze —Crack! Like a walnut, only louder. Did—? Who first, in this red room, saw nothing now See nothing else: our baby pyramid Overexcited, split along its flawed Fire escapes to spectral rubble . . . Well, Something had to give. And will light learn To modify its power before our turn? We humbly hope so. Four. No further sign Of who approaches, or of his design— Only the radiance inching into place. By five the breath indrawn is held and held. 110 gArnet poems The world was everything that was the case? Open the case. Lift out the fabulous Necklace, in form a spiral molecule Whose sparklings outmaneuver time, space, us. Here where the table glistens, cleared, one candle Shines invisibly in the slant light Beside our nameless houseplant. It’s the hour When Hell (a syllable identified In childhood as the German word for bright —So that my father’s cheerful “Go to Hell,” Long unheard, and Vaughan’s unbeatable “They are all gone into a world of light” Come, even now at times, to the same thing)— The hour when Hell shall render what it owes. Render to whom? how? What at this late date Can be done with the quaint idiom that slips From nowhere to my tongue—or from the parchment Of some old scribe of the apocalypse— But render it as the long rendering to Light of this very light stored by our cells These past five million years, these past five minutes Here by the window, taking in through panes Still bleary from the hurricane a gull’s Ascending aureole of decibels, As numberless four-pointed brilliancies Upon the Sound’s mild silver grid come, go? The message hardly needs decoding, so Sheer the text, so innocent and fleet These overlapping pandemonia: Birdlife, leafplay, rockface, waterglow Lending us their being, till the given Moment comes to render what we owe. ...

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