A Guest’s Luck : WATCH FIRE, <i> By Christopher Merrill (White Pine Press: $14; 191 pp.)</i>

Luck’s a language learned by fits and

starts--

Numbers, dates, an odd word; an

alphabet

Of chance from which whole phrases sometimes come,

Then vanish, like water from a

desert wash. . . .

From “Luck”

Echoes, coincidences, chance resemblances, and the phantasms of desire are Merrill’s luck. On the lookout for such apparitions, he makes his way through broken country. Roads, in these poems, are to be crossed, not followed, and alertness is the litany that the poet paces off. Luck rises up and beckons like a mirage, like the mysterious identity of “now” and “then” along memory’s branch. Merrill discovers constellations in the moss; a father’s diligence in the late-night labors of a tugboat; the marriage of salt flats and a grave. He points to the woman in a tree with yellow leaves and helps us listen for an anthem in the bawling of a calf.

In short, Christopher Merrill pursues his luck through “Correspondences.” This is both the title of a section in his “Children’s Suite” and a word closely associated with such descendants of the French symbolists as Andre Breton, Rene Char, and Jaime Sabines. In his translations from these three poets, as well as in his allusions and dedications to them, Merrill conveys the genealogy of an arresting imagination. He loves the predecessors who have lent their strange velocity to his own images. No anxiety of influence prevails here; nor is there evidence of a desire to follow any models too closely. Rather, there is a generosity that names names, offers praise, then contributes something new. Merrill lives in a landscape of names, surrounded by eloquent scraps of language allowing him to chant the senses’ progress through the world. Here’s the poet strolling past the morning’s catch in “Pike Place Market Variations:”

O savor of salt

and salmon--the holy

And nomadic chinook

neatly filleted in ice;

The king and coho

caught by a troller

Or gleaned from a gill net,

gulls circling overhead

And loaves of baked bread

steaming in waxed bags,

Salt-rising and sourdough,

the settlers’ legacy . . .

In the gusto of his alliteration and the pulse of his divided lines, Merrill recalls an Anglo-Saxon catalogue of praise. But his discovery of epic possibilities in a stroll through the morning of a modern city is also very much in the American grain. Such exuberance recalls Whitman’s bardic songs of Brooklyn, Ginsberg’s hymns of praise in a California supermarket, Levertov’s calls to taste and see.

Another strong association of the word “correspondences” is with the Puritanism of Jonathan Edwards, who found “Types” of Divine Truth throughout the natural world and who, through the conduit of Emerson, inspired Whitman and the American poetry of natural revelation. While a reader hears many echoes of beloved American poets in Merrill’s book, the figure who feels most immediately present is Robert Frost. One dimension of this affinity is the ardent, yet cagey vision of nature in the work of both poets--suggesting much more than they will ever own to or assert. But there is also a formal connection that might be over- looked by a reader impressed with Merrill’s delight in such forms as single-line aphorisms, prose-paragraphs, and the deftly suspended broken lines of W.S. Merwin. For he also employs blank verse in a number of the poems here, and with an authority that recalls Frost. In the opening stanza of “Coastline,” for instance, his iambic pentameter lines surge with an organic, dynamic quality that bears comparison with Frost’s superb opening in “Directive.”

That inland sea whose coastlines keep expanding.

That ancient ocean in which nothing lives

Save the brine shrimp culled for aquariums

And skittering on its surface hordes of flies

Hoarding our slackening attention, that thought

Which swelled with mountain runoff until it swamped

Sailboats and railroad tracks, saltworks and roads

Still rises since the foothills stripped of timber

Hold nothing back--snowmelt, and mud, and rancor.

Of all his impressive gifts as a poet, the suppleness of rhythms like these is what I value most about “Watch Fire.” Merrill begins the stanza with an almost regular iambic beat; then he slowly gathers up the third line, blurts out the next; he pulls back again in the fifth, but lets go again into the racing flood of lines six through eight. The rhythm of the ninth and final line brings the sentence of this natural disaster to a full, dead stop. Like Frost in “Directive” (and for that matter like Milton at the beginning of “Paradise Lost,”) Merrill also understands the enormous potential in blank verse for suspense. Only after seven lines of ominous distractions does the inland ocean of his syntax arrive (“still rises”) at its main verb.

The fundamental meaning of a poem is rhythmic, not thematic, though in living poetry rhythm always enters into a dialogue with the attendant themes. Whatever the basic form, there’s a feeling of joy in Merrill’s rhythms, as in the improvisations of a skilled athlete. In “A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball,” the first 36 lines are one long sentence. Within this tour de force we watch the boy,

. . . now catching

and tapping on the soft

side of his foot, and juggling

once, twice, three times,

hopping on one foot like a jump-roper

in the gym, now trapping

and holding the ball in midair,

balancing in on the instep

of his weak left foot, steeping forward

and forward and back . . .

Just so, the poet revels in retaining rhythmic balance through a delicious process of recoveries and compensations. This equations of athletic intuition with the poet’s work finds another eloquent figure in “Old Wives’ Tales,” where Merrill writes,

Now the worlds glide, like skates, over the pages

Of the man who rose at daybreak, praying for clear

Weather and words with which to carve a figure

For his joy and grief; the boy who skated along

On the pond in the woods, his hockey stick the rudder

For his rushes up and down the melting ice.

The glide and rush of a life in poetry accord for Merrill with another word as prominent in “Watch Fires” as luck : that word is guest . His opening poem here is in fact called “The Guests.” In its placement as a sort of invitation and its deceptive simplicity, it recalls “The Pasture,” which Frost used as the introduction to his own collected poems. “The Guests” concludes:

And if the earth begins

To hum, and the dry wells refill themselves

The guests may close their eyes--and sing.

When one is a guest in another country, one feels at once disoriented and alert, missing many connections obvious to the natives of that place, yet also amazed by patterns that more familiarity might have obscured. When one is a guest in another’s home one feels grateful for the hospitality, eager to enjoy and, elsewhere, to reciprocate. In both cases, one may also long for one’s own home, or long to have a home. Christopher Merrill’s poems convey the heightened vividness, inseparable from apprehensiveness, of one who is passing through. He is grateful for the grace of true connections, careful not to assume too much, open to what comes next. Merrill understands, likewise, that impulses and experiences are guests within our lives, passing through with unforeseen effects. In the fifth paragraph of “A Primer,” he writes of how “in the course of opening and closing our doors and magazines, of drawing the curtains against the street lamps’ glare, a note of surprise--an unexpected guest--(may) wander into our quiet conversation and lead us not into temptation but up into the canyon. . . .” “Watch Fire” is a remarkably original, ambitious, and unified volume of poetry. Reading and re-reading it felt like encountering a true piece of luck--a chance to leave the expected road and follow the echoes of the present out into the world.