Landscape Design
Let’s be honest: it was a whimsical idea to plant succulents around the stilts of the house sinking into the delta, betting the river would dry up. Nevertheless a certain beauty, even a kind of logic analogous to the logic of poetry, governed our thinking: we knew that time was running short, and so we decided to adorn ourselves in what we imagined to be the trappings of eternity.
If you subtract legal expenses, the executor warned, nothing will be left of the estate. And if you remove the dyed threads from the tapestry commissioned for the rotunda of the central bank, interest rates will stop fluctuating, according to our in-house economist, who demanded that we reduce the color scheme to what might be found in a nursery—a palette consisting of different shades of green. In the new dispensation the seedlings on the riverbank can take full sun.
Violent, was how she described her sleep. Her clumsiness appealed to our idea of order; also her inability to duplicate her grandmother’s meat paste, brought here after the pogroms, the cruelty of which dominated dinner table discussions in her childhood. Time for bed. Why?
BIO
Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.
