A room is compensation for the ephemerality of a career. —Joseph Cornell

When James Merrill died in 1994, he willed his large, turn-of-the-century house on Water Street to the Borough of Stonington, Connecticut. The village improvement committee was free to use the building any way it desired; Merrill made no stipulation in his will. But the National Book Award–winning poet had been an important figure in the village's ongoing literary tradition. The committee decided to keep Merrill's legacy alive by creating a writer-in-residence program. Since 1996, a lucky poet or scholar has lived, for either six months or a full year, in Merrill's curious home across from the harbor. (No stipend is offered, and application is by nomination only.) Writers chosen for residency are notified more than a year in advance. Several Merrill House residents have reported "the happiest period of my life," surrounded by Merrill's books and knickknacks, far removed from the snarl of city life—Boston, New York, or Louisville, in our case.

My husband, Jeffrey Skinner, and I received our call to apply in late 2000. We submitted bios, books, and samples of projects we intended to work on, as well as proposals for community outreach. Months later, we were officially summoned to serve as 2002 James Merrill House poets-in-residence. We drove 913 miles east, arriving in a New England drizzle and damp.

The ground floor at 107 Water Street hosts a village barber, who is almost never without customers, and the Hungry Palette, a fabric shop. An eccentric retired priest lives on the second floor. The third and fourth floors were Merrill's domain, six rooms in which some of the most significant poetry of the last century was written.

It has to be said—upon seeing the apartment for the first time—we were startled by its modesty. "Not what I expected," Jeffrey murmured. Merrill's kitchen was renovated very simply during the '60s. His many prize certificates hung in inexpensive frames over a dented file cabinet, in marked contrast to the illustrious names signing off on the awards—W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey.The parlor is small and dim, even with its oversized Baroque mirror that clears the ceiling by only a half-inch, even with the dazzling bat wallpaper mentioned in Merrill's epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover.

We passed through the parlor and climbed a precipitous staircase with brass handholds on the left and a strong wooden railing on the right. In an instant, our dark first impressions dissolved in a flush of sunlight.

We are a two-poet family, fiercely competitive—not of each other's poetry but of each other's time to write poetry. Upon seeing this gorgeous space, we announced simultaneously, "I'll take it." When reason returned, we settled on a division of morning and afternoon. I worked upstairs from 8 to 12 and Jeffrey followed from 12 to 5. We passed wordlessly on the narrow stairs shortly after Saint Mary's Church bell struck noon. It was a familiar relay, only this time we exchanged a bit of heaven, instead of one of our squalling, defiant children.

The solarium was a late improvement to the house, an expansion of attic into a large, sociable space. Merrill's grand piano is tucked under one eave, with haphazard piles of dusty Chopin and Brahms; a clay stove sits against one wall, tin flue extending to the ceiling like a periscope. And in the center of the room, an awkward array of couch, coffee table, and two Victorian stuffed chairs.

Then there were the windows. Lining three walls, they offered views of Stonington Harbor to the west, Rhode Island's Little Narragansett Bay to the east, and to the south, fidgety hemlocks and densely packed Greek Revival houses. If the eye could penetrate their wood-shingled rooftops, a view of New York's Fishers Island would reveal itself, a long baguette along the horizon. Three states on three sides, a panorama coveted by even the wealthiest Stonington residents.

I wedged a folding table under the harbor vista, the perfect spot to write until the sun rose high enough and my computer screen greened out. Later, I would bring home folders and novels bleached pale and dry, damage I treasured because it was somehow real sunlight, unimpeded by the persistent haze that hangs over Louisville. I began each morning with binoculars, sweeping the sound from harbor to first breakwater. Seagulls, herons, finches all dipped and glided within inches.

"Anemometer," I wrote in my notebook: "a device for measuring wind speed with small cups," attached to the chimneys of several houses below. Then, "howser, outriggers, dredges, winches, kedge, warp, weft, woof." Once we kedged our way off a mud bar on the Mystic River, the silty anchor tossed again and again till our boat glided free. "Here comes the Challynger, her wake like a bride's wedding train," my first strangled sentence. Stonington is the last commercial fishing town in Connecticut and all year long, lobster boats, scallopers, and other huge rusted fishing vessels motor in and out of the harbor. I coveted their names—Anna Marie, Patriot, Northern Orion—more businesslike than the clever ones stenciled on pleasure boats. Still, at night and with all their lights on, they looked chimerical, like drifting amusement parks.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail on the horizon. —Emerson

We called it "the media center," a tiny alcove with Merrill's album collection, books, phone, fax machine, and a stereo system that dated from the '70s. Lean your shoulder into one bookshelf and the entire case swings open to reveal Merrill's study. Once a closet, the room was humanized by a window overlooking the harbor, more bookshelves, and a built-in napping bed. I retreated to this foam-padded hollow when Jeffrey snored, when the Frisbee green of the bedroom floor was more than I could bear, when I longed for oxygen. In all kinds of weather, a direct streak blew off the sound to my open face, cool and delicious like sorbet.

Merrill's desk was cleared of all his belongings, a clean slate for the writer-in-residence. An additional stand-up desk held note cards embossed with his address, brass pushpins, and other odds and ends. Otherwise, Merrill's books filled the place. There was an entire wall of his own work: 30 volumes of poetry, nonfiction, and so on. Above the bed, another wall of poetry, most of these volumes signed "To Jimmy"—his devoted friends called him Jimmy. The intensity of their inscriptions was startling. They spoke of his companionship, mentorship, always his generosity. Some of these poets also had passed away, making the dedications all the more poignant.

It took nearly a month before I felt suited to the place. The evidence of genius was intimidating. His Collected alone was three inches thick. Then there were the plays, fiction, essays, the critical works. Merrill was gay; I was not. I'd never had the pleasure of meeting him, as so many others had. And, risking an unappreciative glance at the gift horse, I was depressed by the seating arrangements. His office chair was unpadded, designed, it appeared, to ruin the lower spine. So I bought a new one and created unkempt piles of books and magazines. It was my way of nesting, with the Columbia Encyclopedia and Merrill's 1974 edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as sturdy bottom branches.

I tiptoed my way toward the great writer, and my own poetry, by rereading Water Street, still my favorite of Merrill's books. Then all of The Changing Light at Sandover and a memoir of his escapades in Europe, A Different Person. Later, Alison Lurie's unsettling sketch of Merrill and his lover David Jackson, Familiar Spirits. I followed two threads simultaneously—memoirs of expatriate writers, including Thekla Clark's Wystan and Chester, Joseph Brodsky's Watermark, and Edmund White and Hubert Sorin's Our Paris, as well as remembrances by Stonington writers—Anthony Bailey's In the Village and Eleanor Perenyi's More Was Lost. The freedom to follow any old trail through literature was exhilarating. My memory and vocabulary began to stir after a long, stupefied sleep.

In my notebook, I scribbled "trou de memoire"—a pun referring to both a memory lapse and a hole dug into history. I took the time to browse, fell in love with cicatrix, tarbony, mullein. Said White: "The word for torch is the most beautiful in French chalumeau, a close rival to Edgar Allan Poe's proposal for the most beautiful sound in English, ‘cellar door.' " Wystan (the W. in W.H.) slipped into a poem I called "Passeggiata":

We are Auden's ‘force of nature,'
as he called the citizens of Ischia.
As he watched, drunk from
Maria's Caffe,
and considered humanity from a
distance

Then, an abundance of sea tales, including Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever, Nathaniel Hilbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, Alistair MacCleod's No Great Mischief and Island. I read this short description from MacCleod's miraculous short story "In the Fall":

And always the shreds of blackened and stringy
seaweed that the ocean has ripped and torn from
its own lower regions, as if this is the season for
self-mutilation— the pulling out of the secret, private, unseen hair.

I stumbled through the house that day in a haze of grief; it was that kind of story. It was that perfect, like the crystalline last line in Merrill's poem "Prism": "The day is breaking someone else's heart."

This house has good karma. —J.D. McClatchy

In the New London Day, under the caption "Poet's Legacy: A House Provided," there's a photo of Merrill standing in his remarkable dining room. Four gauze-curtained windows look out over the harbor, a luscious pear tree, and Water Street below. The walls are painted, as Merrill described them, sunburn pink with brilliant white trim. Under an ornate tin ceiling, we ate our meals; we introduced our daughters to their first lobster rolls and scallops from the Bomster. There, with the pastel chairs pulled close, we tried our hand at the infamous Ouija board. We even used a teacup, as Merrill and Jackson had, but the spirits were not interested and spoke only in consonants. "Give us a vowel or two!" we pleaded. More random Ws, Bs, Zs.

We didn't feel deprived. All around us were the sounds of consolation—the foghorn, train whistle, and church bell; the off and true rhymes of Merrill's poetry; the fog-muffled purr of boat engines and gentle hiss of water seeping into sand. "Thought itself possesses a water pattern," Brodsky said. Soon I was thinking rhythmically and clearly, concentrating as I once had in my thirties. My writing began to absorb its surroundings. "She wears a fish-fin cloud. Stratus, anchored on a shoulder blade." Not a poem without its bluestem, cormorant, mummichog. In "Prayer," a sky-blue ketch pleaded to the harbor,

Oh, grant me the mettle,
the tack of renunciation.
So in my last hour
I can float without pain
inside the semi,
half-hearted circle
of your arms."

I was home. Gradually, unconsciously, I abandoned the formal James Merrill and began to call him by his nickname, Jimmy. I was on a first-name basis—a familiar and deeply satisfied presence drinking my tea at the dining room table, shuffling to the kitchen for another bowl of soup.

A tiny prefix separates belonging from longing. Yet the substance of these two words is miles apart, the difference between splashing about in the waves and frying on the tarmac with binoculars in hand. One morning, while I waited for Doug Radinocci's barber chair and a $10 trim, I mentioned how much we would like to live there, permanently—who wouldn't want to extend their interval in paradise? Did he know of any cheap housing? "Everybody asks me that," he said. "I live in Westerly myself; I could never afford the taxes."

The borough is filled with beautiful Greek Revival homes that remain dark nearly 10 months of the year, their owners miles away in New York or Boston. Yachts and yawls are dry-docked at Dodson's Boatyard, awkward and precarious, like whales perched in trees. Come July, everything changes. As Merrill wrote: "On Main the summer people / Took deep-rooted ease—A leaf turned red, to town they'd head."

The arrival of clement weather was a bittersweet experience for us. It signaled the end of our stay; in one short month, we'd have to forfeit our fantasy of ownership and belonging, dutifully acknowledge the arrival of the noblesse. Sure enough, our favorite coffee shop filled with angular blondes tugging immaculate, smock-dressed toddlers, their husbands hailing each other in overconfident voices. The grandest borough residences rustled with BMWs, picnic baskets, and evening cocktail parties. "Here comes The News," I wrote, "her wake like a slit opening in a woman's skirt." Rupert Murdoch's yacht was longer than a city block, its hull a deep forest green. Its tender was larger than most middle-class runabouts.

In one short month, another lucky writer would enter Merrill's study, dining room, sunroom and claim them, temporarily, as her own. Another poet or scholar would receive that transforming touch of Merrill's renowned, postmortem generosity. As Allan Gurganus said, so rare it is "when the great man is a good man. Some people contain their grace. Jimmy dispersed his."

In addition to annual gifts to the village improvement committee, and countless other causes, Jimmy had established the Ingram Merrill Foundation, which gave grants to writers, artists, and other foundations. My husband received a grant early in his career. The process was mysterious. The money was an instigating factor in his decision to leave business and try his luck at teaching and writing full-time. Nearly 20 years later, with the pressures of work squeezing our writing lives down to about an hour a day, Merrill again had pointed the way to an escape hatch. We had each finished more than 30 poems during our six months on Water Street—more than three years' worth under normal circumstances. Merrill's rooms had indeed been a stay against the ephemerality of a career.

Writers-in-residence at 107 have customarily left something behind, as thanks. We bought a new VCR and porch furniture. We wedged signed copies of our books into the burgeoning shelves. We scavenged for beloved white stones on Napatree Point and placed them next to Merrill's glass unicorns and miniature Buddhas. Then we packed up our van and left without looking back, with not a little sorrow for what we had found, there, in Jimmy's house.

Sarah Gorham is the author of three poetry collections: the forthcoming The Cure (Four Way Books, 2003), The Tension Zone (Four Way Books, 1996), and Don't Go Back to Sleep (Galileo, 1989). Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Grand Street, Poetry, and the Nation, among other journals. She is the editor in chief of Sarabande Books.