As I follow the unnerving news out of Fukushima, I think of James Merrill’s Prose of Departure, a late, morbid poem, describing a visit of his to Japan. (The poem isn’t available in its entirety online. Here’s another excerpt from it.)

Radiation – both remembered, from Hiroshima, and felt in every afternoon’s sun – is the black and blindingly white, the despairing and the appalling, correlative to the poet’s dread about friends back in the States who are dying.

The recognition of life’s “date line,” impending death, “comes flashing up” on the poet, like “the next six-foot wave in an epic poem.” He needs “a form of conscious evasion,” a “composure like the target a Zen archer sees through shut eyes.” Watching a Noh play, the poet embraces the evasion of art, in the form of an actor who “will relive moonlight, storm and battle, and withdraw, having danced himself to peace.”

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Later that night, as he observes the moon cloud over, spiritual and aesthetic composure fail the poet; he cannot evade “A dark thought that fills the psyche, leaving a bare brilliant cuticle, then nothing, a sucked breath, a pall.”

The next day, at a shrine, when he “place[s] incense upon [a] brazier already full of warm, fragrant ash,” the poet

tries vainly
to hold back a queer
sob. Inhaling the holy
smoke, praying for dear

life —

Burning, the burning of the body and the soul, the holy smoke of what was once the holiness of a beloved friend – for the poet, there’s absolutely no evading this. From now on, each section of the poem will feature counterpoints between exotic immediacies and homeland premonitions. With brilliant wordplay, Merrill will twist his perception of a painting (in this instance, View of Fuji) to fit his fatal mood:

Syringe in bloom. Bud
drawn up through a stainless stem…

Not spring, but syringe; and syringe, with the proximity of bloom and bud, will have us read bud as blood… drawn up… a pipetting syringe… The stainless stem suggests not purity so much as hospital sterilization.

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As the poem concludes, the poet makes explicit not only death, but the irradiating evisceration of our humanity:

The prevailing light in this “Hiroshima” of trivial symptoms and empty forebodings is neither sunrise nor moonglow but rays that promptly undo whatever enters their path. 

This killing radiation is the worst form of energy in existence; all of the Proustian nuance, the artful evasive beauty, we give life in order to give it life, is knocked out. The poet imagines the x-rays his friends are undergoing, rays which, “in their haste to photograph Truth… eat through” all of their cultural apparel, all of their existential theatricals. (“[B]eing enchanted by the magic of experience provides a reason to live. Rather than being an aid to survival, consciousness provides an essential incentive to survive. Enchantment is itself ‘the biological advantage of being awestruck.'”)

“What’s the story, Doc?”
— dark, cloud-chambered negatives
held to the light.

Prose of Departure ends in a kimono shop, with the poet and his lover enchanted by “the most fabulous kimono of all: dark, dark purple traversed by a winding, starry path.”

Dark and light again, then, with a benign and storied lightness applied, generated, made up, by the artist, as a kind of defiance of both radiation’s momentary flash and death’s permanent darkness.

Dyeing. A homophone deepens the trope. Surrendering to Earth’s colors, shall we not be Earth, before we know it? Venerated therefore is the skill which, prior to immersion, inflicts upon a sacrificial length of crêpe de Chine certain intricate knottings no hue can touch. So that one fine day, painstakingly unbound, this terminal gooseflesh, the fable’s whole eccentric

star-puckered moral —
white, never-to-blossom buds
of the mountain laurel —

may be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.