In July 1947 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the doomsday clock, predicting the time left before the end of human history, stood at seven minutes before midnight (169); by January 1981 it stood at four minutes to midnight (1). (1) In 1993 the Union of Concerned Scientists issued its Warning to Humanity, predicting that not checked, many of our current practices ... may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain in the manner that we know (1). (2) Poets took note of these predictions. Early in the trilogy of works that became The Changing Light at Sandover, in a meditation on power, James Merrill wrote: Plutonium waste Eking out in drowned steel rooms a half Life of how many million years? Enough To set the doomsday clock--its hands our own: The same rose ruts, the red-as-thorn crosshatchings-- Minutes nearer midnight.... (55) (3) Twenty-five years later, Jorie Graham wrote: [this book] is written up against the sensation of what is now called 'ecocide.' I was also influenced by, among other texts, the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity (Never 111). In the face of dire evidence of the destructive potential of human thought, or of its unspoken, unconscious assumptions, each of these poets has engaged in a prolonged examination of the linguistic imagination--an urgent undertaking if language constitutes the worlds of our experience, the worlds in which we act and react. In The Changing Light at Sandover Merrill celebrates the metaphoric imagination, dramatizing especially the transformative contact it enables among compartmentalized selves and relations to the world; such contact, he suggests, produces a more conscious and flexible response to perils without and within. In much of her recent work, but particularly in Materialism and Never, Graham struggles to find a language in which to register the world as plural and disjunct, with the human speaker as a marginal rather than a central and ordering figure. Because metaphoric condensation and superimposition tend to efface disjunctions she would save, she dramatizes a critical vigilance toward those gestures even as she is performing them, and deconstructive turns abound in her late poems. In sustained but contrasting ways, both poets thus explore the ethical effects of linguistic production. The Changing Light at Sandover stages the metaphoric imagination in its unending elaboration of of life--with forms of life extending beyond selves to relations, discourses, and structures of time and memory (see Johnston 121-22). In Lewis Thomas's essays, Merrill had found itself described as an astonishing anomaly: The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond. (141) (4) Merrill aligns transformative metaphoric processes with those biological forces that resist dissolution by elaborating complexity, and he dramatizes that alignment at many levels in the trilogy. Within a few years of Sandover's completion, Julia Kristeva introduced Tales of Love with a related perception, analogizing the metaphoric process of transference, which reorganizes subjectivities in the direction of greater complexity, to the mutual reorganization of biological open systems (14-15). The openness of a biological open system--and by analogy, of a psychic one--is, she argues, double. Each such system opens its boundary to an other, and the resulting process of reorganization, by destabilizing previously existing structures, [opens up] each system to its heterogeneous components (15). Sandover vividly dramatizes the opening of the authorial self to relations, systems, discourses, and forces that exceed it. …