About Me

I am a happy and honest person and generally like to live by my rules. Sometimes though I tend to go into bouts of manic depression and then I have to bank on the phoenix within me to help me out.... I thought to create this blog for everyone who needs a phoenix now and then, as a place to rejuvenate, or as Holden Caulfield would say, as a 'Catcher in the Rye'. I want it to be a small portal for people like me who are also on the path of self-discovery. All are welcome here to share their experiences and views. Thanks.

Monday, November 16, 2009

About the Phoenix

by James Merrill

But in the end one tires of the high-flown. If it were simply a matter of life or death We should by now welcome the darkening room, Wrinkling of linen, window at last violet, The rosy body lax in a chair of words, And then the appearance of unsuspected lights. We should walk wonderingly into that other world With its red signs pulsing and long lit lanes. But often at nightfall, ambiguous As the city itself, a giant jeweled bird Comes cawing to the sill, dispersing thought Like a birdbath, and with such final barbarity As to wear thin at once terror and novelty. So that a sumptuous monotony Sets in, a pendulum of amethysts In the shape of a bird, keyed up for ever fiercer Flights between ardor and ashes, back and forth; Caught in whose talons any proof of grace, Even your face, particularly your face Fades, featureless in flame, or wan, a fading Tintype of some cooling love, according To the creature’s whim. And in the end, despite Its pyrotechnic curiosity, the process Palls. One night Your body winces grayly from its chair, Embarks, a tearful child, to rest On the dark breast of the fulfilled past. The first sleep here is the sleep fraught As never before with densities, plume, oak, Black water, a blind flapping. And you wake Unburdened, look about for friends—but O Could not even the underworld forego The publishing of omens, naively? Nothing requires you to make sense of them And yet you shiver from the dim clay shore, Gazing. There in the lake, four rows of stilts Rise, a first trace of culture, shy at dawn Though blackened as if forces long confined Had smouldered and blazed forth. In the museum You draw back lest the relics of those days —A battered egg cup and a boat with feet— Have lost their glamour. They have not. The guide Fairly exudes his tale of godless hordes Sweeping like clockwork over Switzerland, Till what had been your very blood ticks out Voluptuous homilies. Ah, how well one might, If it were less than a matter of life or death, Traffic in strong prescriptions, “live” and “die”! But couldn’t the point about the phoenix Be not agony or resurrection, rather A mortal lull that followed either, During which flames expired as they should, And dawn, discovering ashes not yet stirred, Buildings in rain, but set on rock, Beggar and sparrow entertaining one another, Showed me your face, for that moment neither Alive nor dead, but turned in sleep Away from whatever waited to be endured?