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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.
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Armenian Stanzas
For Michael Collier
The scribes would mix together gold and garlic
To save their handiwork from worms and evil;
Draw slant-eyed holy men to trick the Mongols;
Divide the liturgy in two to keep
The Word alive in unfavorable times.
Conservators restored these manuscripts
Devoted to the Gospels, medicine,
Music, arithmetic, and geography.
What do these illustrated pages show?
Poor students suffering the consequences.
__________
We held our tongues about the prisoners
Until the Wall came down, and so we spoke
About taboos in a society
Halfway around the world—racial injustice,
Disparities between the rich and poor—
Where literature was not an open system
But a space bounded by memory and desire.
On whose authority were they released—
These prisoners of ideology
Remanded to our care? We do not know.
__________
Imagine your tenth anniversary,
The waiter said to the couple arguing
Over her hair, and then he tossed their order
(Flank steak for him, a beet salad for her)
Into the oven, with his credit cards
And life insurance policy. Good riddance,
He told the chef, removing his stained apron
To drape over the cockroaches in the pantry.
And as he marched into the autumn night
He felt a wave of grief wash over him.
__________
What Gregory the Illuminator saw
In his monastic cell will light this page
Until daybreak, when we will write new prayers
For the returning pilgrims caught in a storm
Below the Monastery of the Spears,
Where they tied handkerchiefs to the bare branches
Of the trees lining both sides of the stream:
Please spare my family from sickness, doubt,
And poverty, the whims of murderous
Regimes, the agony of exodus.
__________
On Candlemas, the coldest day of winter,
Newlyweds build a bonfire in the yard
To circle then jump over, clearing the flames
For good luck and fertility—the staples
Of happiness according to the myth
Of endless love adopted by romantic
Poets who cater to a coterie
Of disappointed lovers, not the faithful
For whom the Presentation of the Christ
Child to the Temple denotes love eternal.
__________
The students demonstrate against the draft,
While volunteers from the diaspora
Return to fight for an imaginary
Homeland lost in Nagorno-Karabakh,
In the last days of the disintegrating
Soviet Union; hence the Russian soldiers
Patrolling borders west and east; hence, too,
The dream of emigration everyone
We meet confides before we say goodbye:
See you in Montreal or Monterey.
__________
At closing time in the memorial
To the first modern genocide, I pray
For the saints canonized on the centenary
Of their expulsion from Paradise—
1.5 million men, women, and children
Exterminated by the Ottomans.
Who, after all, the Führer said, speaks today
Of the annihilation of the Armenians?
Crows circle overhead as we approach
The monument and its eternal flame.
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Instructions for the Winter Solstice
Mix the seeds gathered from the spent sunflower heads stacked behind the fence with ashfall from a forest fire to draft a memorandum of understanding between the ocean and the sky.
Sprinkle venom milked from the blue coral snake over the oldest ledgers in the National Gallery, then command the choir to sing the hymns proscribed by the last constitutional assemble.
Use the interactive seismic map of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to predict down to the minute when the new government will fall and how much damage the aftershocks will cause.
Whitewash a page in the Calendar of Saints then paint over it in shades of grey a lunar mare drawn from the images taken on the first expedition to the moon.
Donate the collection of shoes, pumps, and heels confiscated at the spring cotillion to the homeless veterans lined up for the midnight showing of Repo Man.
Replace the wind chimes on the porch with the recording of a raven mimicking its lost mate’s call, which the naturalist’s friends played for him on his deathbed.
Remember the pained expression on the kayaker’s face when the glacier calved, producing a wave that carried us to the shore of another world.
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The River
The caravan stopped on the bridge to listen to the guitarist, a woman in a yellow sari who had lost her family in a fire set by insurgents. She sat under an umbrella pocked with so many holes that the sunlight speckled the fabric saved from her wedding, singing her son’s favorite lullaby, trying to remember the beginning of the dream in which he delivered a lecture in an empty auditorium on the subject of chance, asserting that accident is central to the design of the universe. What did he love? Chocolate, football, and the way the river dried up every summer, stranding the barges carrying grain to the sea. Three days the camels had gone without water. The drivers sang along.
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Stage Presence
The shooting at the wedding party did not begin until daybreak, when the soldiers assembled to sweep the streets, and did not stop until the government fell, when the soldiers laid down their brooms. The widow, hanging her silks to dry from a balcony above the empty square, watched a horse-drawn carriage pass, a bloodied curtain dangling from its window. How to bear the end with dignity? She lingered in the sunlight, listening for birdsong, bells, the call of the fruit-seller: any trace at all of the old order. She spread her arms, as if to greet an invisible crowd—elegant men and women in evening attire, rising to their feet. And while her neighbors huddled behind their shutters, monitoring the military broadcasts, she prepared to sing an encore. Bravo! cried the soldiers entering the square, trailing clouds of dust. Bravo! cried her neighbors.
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