Nights and Days
April 23, 2025 at 11:45PMI found myself swiftly transported to the other side of Henri Cole’s essay for The Paris Review, delivered there by a succession of scenes delivered with crisp authority, like a friend handing you a series of photographs. Cole, best known for his poetry, moves episodically through his relationships with a small, close group of writing teachers and friends—primarily James Merrill, a Pulitzer Prize winner who died thirty years ago—as the AIDS crisis looms and then descends upon them. Cole’s scenes arrive out of sequence, rich with detail and intimate access; liberated from chronology, they better reveal his deepening friendship with Merrill as the latter nears death. Devastation lurks throughout, but it is shot through with levity and grace. “Maybe anybody who can become transparent to experience and articulate it truthfully and without distortion is a poet,” Cole writes. “Even if the facts are scary or horrible, what comes out, if true, might be beautiful.”
In Merrill’s backyard, a giant mirror leans against the high fence, making an eerie duplicate of the pool setting. The mirror is rusty, with Spanish moss dripping over its top edge. I remember all the mirrors in Merrill’s poems in which we recognize different versions of ourselves. Merrill speaks with candor about his relationships and describes himself as a caretaker. I ask if coming from a broken home makes us this way. He seems to feel guilt about the situation in which he finds himself. He tells me that as a young man he didn’t believe anything his parents told him and that if he’d been born decades later, he probably would have rebelled by doing drugs as so many others have done. He recounts his father reading to him as a child from Gone with the Wind as if he were reading from Ovid or Homer. Merrill is bare-chested and wearing his swim trunks. He is about to exercise on his cross-country-skiing machine. Then the mail arrives and a letter falls between the cedar slats of the terrace, so we get down on our knees and peer into the darkness until he cries out with relief, “It’s only the Stonington telephone bill!”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/23/nights-and-days/
via IFTTT
Watch