The richly imagined fables, vignettes, and prose poems of Flares reveal the elementary strangeness of this world. Here is the improvised travel record of a poet haunted by history, who documents what he discovers in foreign lands with an exacting and hallucinatory eye. Composed in transit, on diplomatic missions to scores of countries, Flares will endure in the reader’s imagination as a series of signals in the night, illuminating the hidden corners of our time here on earth.
Christopher Merrill
Flare
The rent was late, and nobody thought to dig up the sacks of gold buried under the black flags lining the road through the desert. At dusk a gas flare lit the eyes of a nomad who had lost hope of finding water this late in the season; his herd had been reduced by half, and if he believed the oasis was no longer within walking distance he said nothing to his son, who was planning his escape, not to the city but to the refinery at the edge of the sea. One condition of employment there was to undergo weekly blood tests; the other, to ignore the orders of any engineer who did not kneel before the falconer. Open the door, his father said one night in his sleep. Who is it? said the boy. The landlord, said his father. His ship sails at dawn.
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 loss of everything she loved with dignity? She lingered in the sunlight, listening for birdsong, bells, the call of the fruit-seller: any trace 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.
