Scott Harney: Becoming a Poet

Volume 32

Oct 10

IN THE CATACOMBS OF PALERMO
Scott Harney

Postcard of the Palermo Catacombs, from the poet’s collection

In the catacombs of Palermo, the dead
are on display, dressed in the finery
of their time—a gallery of rag and bone.
They’re hung like puppets on the walls,
or laid on shelves, some in caskets
lidded with glass, others caged
in chicken wire. The first ones here
were monks in 1599, then priests and nuns,
later on the famous or anyone who paid.

Attempts were made to mummify.
Bodies were allowed three months to drain,
then washed in vinegar, but during epidemics
quickly dipped in arsenic or lime.
What’s left of skin is crust on skulls,
jaws dropped open. Yawn or scream?
Either way they mock along this gauntlet
as only dead Sicilians can.

That Bourbon colonel, his dusty uniform
still buttoned to his rotted jaw, arrived in 1848
and still keeps order here in case
the inmates try to rise against their fate
to be exposed forever in their poses
and cry to join the lucky ones beneath the dirt
who putrefy in peace and privacy.

And then we come to Rosalia, the last one
to check in, who died at two a hundred years ago,
named for Palermo’s patron saint,
a hermitess whose bones were found
inside the cave she prayed in. The preservation
of the child’s flesh is legend, owing to a formula
of Alfredo Salafia, a local taxidermist
turned embalmer: formaldehyde to disinfect,
alcohol to dry, glycerin to soften, salicylic acid
as a fungicide, and finally for a fixative,
salts of zinc. Behold her face,
still the soft bronze it was the day she died,
her cheeks two polished plums.
Her eyes are closed, but each lash is intact.
If you stare longer than you should,
you just might see a tiny cloud of breath
clinging to the glass that seals her in
with the air of 1920.

You rise into the heat and slide
into a taxi, the rooftops of Palermo
burning in the setting sun. The driver laughs
as faces on the sidewalks turn
to bone, empty sockets staring as you pass.
You ride through Quattro Canti,
where two streets cross to mark the center
of the city and a sooty statue of a Spanish king
rules each corner, each one more alive
than anything, including you, preserved
by air conditioning, windows rolled up tight
against the steaming press of traffic.
Back at your hotel, you walk dazed across the lobby,
order a Negroni at the bar: Campari
to sustain your bitterness, red vermouth
to keep you sweet, gin to cut back both
and hold your smile firm.

Six years ago, shortly after my partner, Scott Harney, died at 63 from complications of mantle cell lymphoma, a friend who’d lost his partner to AIDS in the ‘90s offered some advice. Shift to sleeping on his side of the bed, he told me. Right away.

I imagined my friend, nearly thirty years younger, arriving home from the hospital where he’d held his partner’s hand to the end, unable to sleep that night in their shared bed. Had shifting sides blocked the sight of his lover’s absence, now permanent, tempering his grief? Had my friend conjured his lover’s arms wrapping around him as he slid across the sheets?

With Scott it had not been like that. I returned from a weekend conference to find he’d died in his sleep, all 6'1" of him stretched out on his side of the bed. He’d wanted this: a swift, private death when his heart stopped, as we both knew it would one day soon. In a week—a month—a year, the doctors had said the winter before this late spring Sunday.

Before returning to that bed, I had to buy a new mattress. And then I found I liked to be fooled by the small jungle-themed travel pillow I kept among the larger ones, which sometimes worked its way to the top of a jumble of twisted blankets on the far side of the bed, Scott’s side. When I glanced into the room at the unmade bed, wasn’t that Scott’s dark hair poking out above his sleeping form?

If I’d moved to Scott’s side of the bed, would I have dreamed the dreams that came every few weeks, in which Scott appeared to me alive again? We were carrying groceries in from the car, waiting to greet friends on our front porch. I was happy, relieved to know I’d been mistaken about his death. But soon I’d be gripped by anxiety—if Scott was still alive, what would I say to everyone who’d offered sympathy for my loss? What would he think of me, telling his family and friends he was dead when he wasn’t? And I’d published a book of his poems without asking his permission. Would he be angry about the choices I’d made?

—

With my friend’s advice in mind, I took over Scott’s chair at our kitchen table, where we always sat across from each other. Scott preferred the seat closest to the refrigerator, which he could open with one long arm to reach for his pitcher of homemade, scarcely sweetened lemonade and refill his glass without getting up. The round white-pine table that Scott had sanded and varnished to a high sheen was the only table in our apartment, and it took up most of the floor space in our kitchen. When it wasn’t mealtime, I graded papers, drafted essays and books, sitting in my chair with its back to the stove while Scott was at work downtown, or reading poetry (Hugo, Levine, Dobyns, Dunn) in his recliner in the living room, or trawling eBay for antique postcards of Naples on his computer in the bedroom. Or writing poems, though I wouldn’t know that.

It was hard for me to look at Scott’s empty chair, so I sat in it. I sat there to make calls to the mortuary and the estate lawyer and the bank and the life insurance and credit card and telephone companies. I tried to speak to each representative with Scott’s patient authority. For much of his adult life, he’d worked “in corporate America,” as he referred to his paralegal jobs, and he knew his way around a bureaucracy. But sometimes I cried on the phone in response to kindness, or intransigence.

I sat there to read through the poetry collections I hadn’t known Scott had assembled in the 1980s and ‘90s, which had gone unpublished. A handful of them, in dark-colored binders, were stacked on the bottom shelf of a bookcase in my office—the bookcase he didn’t have room for alongside his desk in the bedroom, so he’d asked if he could have the space against the wall behind the piano bench. (Yes, I have a Steinway grand in my office, much larger than my desk, with my own low bookshelves and file storage baskets tucked beneath it.) But I couldn’t read Scott’s manuscript pages with his voice in my head, his opinions in mind, because I had no idea what he’d have said, or even why he saved these homemade books and never told me about them. I only knew that the many dozens of poems, though different in subject matter, were as polished and resonant as the sixteen he’d forwarded to me in a Word doc when the doctors issued their grim prognosis. I knew those sixteen well, all of them written since his divorce in 2002 and our reunion a half-decade later, thirty years after a brief college tryst. There was even a love poem addressed to me among them.

Following fast on my friend’s advice to shift sides of the bed had come an email from Askold Melnyczuk asking to publish the poems he’d heard Scott read at a friend’s house one night several years before. Were there enough to make a chapbook? I sent Askold the Word doc. Then we met in the Fogg Art Museum’s café to read through the bound manuscripts and another dozen recent poems I’d retrieved from Scott’s computer and folders on his desk, amazed at what we found. This would be more than a chapbook. Together we made the selections, and that was the beginning of Scott becoming something he never was in his lifetime: a published poet.

—

Five years after the publication of The Blood of San Gennaro: Selected Poems in 2020, I often forget that Scott didn’t know any of this: the flurry to assemble, design, and print the book; the choice of cover art (an eighteenth century Neapolitan townscape by the Welsh artist-traveler Scott loved, Thomas Jones) and author photo (Scott posed on a rocky ledge in a location I can’t identify because I wasn’t there). The collecting of blurbs. How swiftly they came in—from Jane Shore! (Scott’s professor in the 1970s, who remembered “his original gift.”) From James Carroll! (The writer his mother revered above all others.) From Gail Mazur, Lloyd Schwartz, and Andrea Cohen!—poets whose friendship Scott cherished, but on whom he’d never have imposed his writing. There were reviews and interviews (with me), and some of the poems were placed in journals: Salmagundi, Harvard Review, Plume. Several were translated into Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. There were readings and concerts; the composer Scott Wheeler set “Waiting for Snow” for baritone and piano.

The Covid-19 pandemic overshadowed many of these achievements, and made my widow’s loneliness acute. Sometimes I told myself it was fortunate Scott hadn’t lived on into the dire medical crisis, ill as he’d been. But that was another way of fooling myself. Still, without the need for a Zoom book launch, would I have thought to hire my brilliant former student JennyMae Kho to create a video, with poets and friends reading selections from the book? Would I have joined with David Gullette, Literary Director of The Poets’ Theatre, to write and perform a two-person play, Meet Scott Harney, that introduced his life and work to Zoom audiences and, in recent years, to live ones? The project of bringing Scott’s poems into the world brought new community for me in my solitude.

Long before any of this, while researching my biography of Elizabeth Bishop, I interviewed Amram Shapiro, a close friend in Bishop’s last years, who speculated that the poet’s love for the much younger Alice Methfessel was partly fueled by a desire to find the right person to whom she could bequeath her small fortune and far more significant literary estate. Scott loved me, and he never asked favors. Even when he forwarded the sixteen poems, it was at my request—I didn’t want to lose them too. But I wonder now whether something in his poet’s DNA drew him to me, a biographer skilled at shaping a writer’s life out of the raw material of manuscripts, just when the cancer, not yet detected but soon to threaten our newly re-kindled romance, took hold.

After Scott died, old friends (old girlfriends, mostly) sent me letters and poems he’d written for them. In 1978, the year after his college graduation, Scott wrote to Kathy Scanlon, a flame from high school days: “After much consideration, decided that I must be a poet, believe in what I’m doing, and survive whatever way I can that doesn’t distract me too much from writing. . . . Plan to spend my life this way. Nothing else makes sense, even if I’m never published or known, I’ll die in peace and maybe become posthumously famous.”

He’d stayed true to his plan. Was it my job to make his bid for the improbable?

—

In the past year, I’ve placed Scott’s papers—the handmade books, college essays, and miscellaneous unpublished works—with Harvard University Archives, and his collection of antique Italian postcards with the Boston Athenaeum. I’ve found homes for two magnificent late poems that Scott excluded from the collection of sixteen.

The first, “Letter to Hugo from Galleria Umberto I,” appears in the Summer/Fall 2025 issue of Poetry Northwest, a journal that, along with the above mentioned Salmagundi, had rejected Scott’s submissions in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Richard Hugo, to whom the poem is posthumously addressed, in the fashion of Hugo’s own verse letters, was a co-founder of Poetry Northwest. The poem puts Hugo’s desolate post-WWII Naples in conversation with Scott’s explorations of the city in the 21st century, concluding:

. . . Perhaps I’ll walk along the waterfront tonight,
when sea is black and slaps against the balustrade while Pakistani boys
sell rocket toys that rise and spark but never reach the moon. We bomb
and beg forgiveness, then bomb again. It never ends. Con affetto, Scott.

The second, “In the Catacombs of Palermo,” is published above. In 2013, Scott gave in to my urging that he attend a poetry workshop when he discovered that Bread Loaf director Michael Collier had recently established a September session in Sicily, a portion of Italy Scott had long wanted to visit. The poems he submitted brought admission, and he looked forward to a week of work with the eminent poet to whom he’d been assigned, a friend of his long-ago professor Jane Shore, and even more to the touring he planned to do on the island, in Cefalù and Palermo, after the workshop. The hitch: in spring he was hospitalized for weeks, dangerously ill with congestive heart failure, the result of chemo treatments for lymphoma six years before. His doctors forbade foreign travel, then required him to wear a defibrillator vest at all times if he insisted on making the trip. The decision was almost impossible. Scott wanted to go, but he didn’t want to be pitied for his medical condition. Nor did he want to die. What could he wear under the hot Sicilian sun that would conceal the vest?

Scott traveled to Italy. He never said how often he wore the cumbersome vest, although he told me before leaving that he’d invested in trip insurance with a provision for repatriation of his remains, should he die on foreign soil. As he’d expected, Scott didn’t gain much from the Bread Loaf sessions, in which the eminent poet first featured his poems, then blew up at him inexplicably on the last day. Further confirmation that poetry workshops weren’t for him. (The other students, all female, were stunned as well, Scott told me. Would the poet have treated him differently if Scott had mentioned that Jane Shore was his teacher? And Robert Lowell? But Scott would never have done that.) He went on to the beaches of Cefalù, where he took a risk and swam without the vest, then to Palermo.

I don’t know when Scott wrote “In the Catacombs of Palermo,” although it wasn’t immediately after his return. The slow season at work that enabled his September travel was over, and he was working long hours in corporate America again. And there was more to learn: I found a file of marked up printouts among his papers, documenting research on the catacombs’ inhabitants and embalming practices.

The poem, like all good poems, requires no explanation. But I find in it Scott’s heightened awareness of his mortality: congestive heart failure is incurable; he’d just received a slow death sentence. And there’s the fascination, not new to him but a central theme here, with what happens to body and spirit in death. The catacombs’ corpses might “rise against their fate.” Those buried underground are “the lucky ones . . . who putrefy in peace and privacy.” It’s with a chill that I read Scott’s comment on the “sooty” statues of Spanish kings that overlook a busy intersection: “each one more alive / than anything, including you.” The beautiful, mordant closing lines remind me of Scott’s fondness for Negronis, which he claimed to have discovered well in advance of the fad. I can testify he was drinking them as early as 2003.

A few weeks ago, I moved back to my side of the kitchen table. My old chair, with its back to the oven, feels comfortably familiar now. I’ve conjured Scott Harney for readers, for myself: the poet who was never here, and always was. His seat is no longer empty.

Scott Harney: Becoming a Poet

A song of peace for their land and for mine

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