… and the Inside Higher Ed piece that goes with it, not to mention the Cristina Nehring accompaniment, UD‘s moved by the love letters exchanged between Governor Sanford and Maria Belén Chapur. UD‘s moved by the explosion of passion in the life of a prominent buttoned-down public person.

Indeed the public/private life contrast has rarely displayed itself more sharply than in this tale of escape from official routine, and embrace of the strange freedom of lovers.

Here’s part of a James Merrill poem that seems to me to rise to the occasion.

It’s In Nine Sleep Valley, and it describes two lovers who’ve escaped to a cottage deep in the woods to be alone. The poet gazes at his lover, draped in a white sheet and sitting in a chair, preparing to get his hair cut by the poet.

The poet tries to interpret the lover’s smile: Is it debonair, narcissistic, enjoying the adoring attentions of the poet? Is the lover wondering more broadly what new sort of person the transforming alembic of love will make him? Is his smile an effort to stay in the vibrant eros of the moment, and keep off thoughts of death?

The poet himself, echoing Faust, indeed prays that this perfect moment of lovers’ private bliss, which he knows will wither, might somehow never end. Looking at his lover in his white sheet, he has a dark vision of a dead body, its hair grown out and tangled amid physical rot, and he knows that this “must in time be our affair.”

Or, wonders the poet, is his lover smiling as he contemplates the botched job the poet will do on his hair?

Well, the poet thinks, even if his lover is worried about his imperfections as a barber, the lover should know that even “the clumsiest love” makes the loved one beautiful.

Sit then, draped in a sheet whose snowy folds
Darken in patches as when summer comes
And sun goes round and round the melting mountain.
Smiling debonair

You maybe wait for some not seen till now
Aspect of yours to blaze from the alembic
While one of mine in robe and slippers cries
Ah stay! Thou art so fair!

Or else are smiling not to wince recalling
Locks the grave sprang open. Blind, untrimmed,
Sheeted with cold, such rot and tangle must
In time be our affair.

But should you smile as those who doubt the novice
Hands they entrust their beautiful heads to,
I want to show you how the clumsiest love
Transfigures if you let it, if you dare.

There was a day when beauty, death, and love
Were coiled together in one crowning glory.
Shears in hand, we parted the dark waves…
Look at me, dear one. There.

Toward the end of the poem, the poet wonders whether in time the lovers will “hunger for each other / When one goes north and one goes east” — and he answers himself in this way:

Enough for them was a feast
Of flaws, the molten start and glacial sleep, the parting kiss…

Centimeters deep yawns the abyss.

An awkward verse, a clumsy love, one the poet in his final lines offers the loved one as a schoolboy might offer a lover a silly flower he made out of paper:

Take these verses, call them today’s flower,
Cluster a rained-in pupil might have scissored.
They too have suffered in the realm of hazard.
Sorry things all. Accepting them’s the art.