W.S. Merwin : 25 Poems

 






Echoing Light
 
When I was beginning to read I imagined
that bridges had something to do with birds
and with what seemed to be cages but I knew
that they were not cages it must have been autumn
with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires
and those orange places on fire in the pictures
and now indeed it is autumn the clear
days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing
over dry grass that yesterday was green
the empty corn standing trembling and a down
of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields
and everywhere the colors I cannot take
my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams
red it is the season of migrants
flying at night feeling the turning earth
beneath them and I woke in the city hearing
the call notes of the plover then again and
again before I slept and here far downriver
flocking together echoing close to the shore
the longest bridges have opened their slender wings
 
 

The Laughing Child
 
When she looked down from the kitchen window
into the back yard and the brown wicker
baby carriage in which she had tucked me
three months old to lie out in the fresh air
of my first January the carriage
was shaking she said and went on shaking
and she saw I was lying there laughing
she told me about it later it was
something that reassured her in a life
in which she had lost everyone she loved
before I was born and she had just begun
to believe that she might be able to
keep me as I lay there in the winter
laughing it was what she was thinking of
later when she told me that I had been
a happy child and she must have kept that
through the gray cloud of all her days and now
out of the horn of dreams of my own life
I wake again into the laughing child
 
 
One of the Lives
 
If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father
               had broken a leg parachuting into Provence
to join the resistance in the final stage of the war
               and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north
out of Italy and if the friend who was with him
               as he was dying had not had an elder brother
who also died young quite differently in peacetime
               leaving two children one of them with bad health
who had been kept out of school for a whole year by an illness
               and if I had written anything else at the top
of the examination form where it said college
               of your choice or if the questions that day had been
put differently and if a young woman in Kittanning
               had not taught my father to drive at the age of twenty
so that he got the job with the pastor of the big church
               in Pittsburgh where my mother was working and if
my mother had not lost both parents when she was a child
               so that she had to go to her grandmother’s in Pittsburgh
I would not have found myself on an iron cot
               with my head by the fireplace of a stone farmhouse
that had stood empty since some time before I was born
               I would not have travelled so far to lie shivering
with fever though I was wrapped in everything in the house
               nor have watched the unctuous doctor hold up his needle
at the window in the rain light of October
               I would not have seen through the cracked pane the darkening
valley with its river sliding past the amber mountains
               nor have wakened hearing plums fall in the small hour
thinking I knew where I was as I heard them fall
 
 
 
 
 
Good People
 
From the kindness of my parents   
I suppose it was that I held  
that belief about suffering  
 
imagining that if only  
it could come to the attention  
of any person with normal  
feelings certainly anyone  
literate who might have gone  
 
to college they would comprehend  
pain when it went on before them  
and would do something about it  
whenever they saw it happen  
in the time of pain the present  
they would try to stop the bleeding  
for example with their own hands  
 
but it escapes their attention  
or there may be reasons for it  
the victims under the blankets  
the meat counters the maimed children  
the animals the animals  
staring from the end of the world
 
 
Yesterday
 
My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand
 
he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know
 
even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes
 
he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father
 
he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me
 
oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me
 
oh yes I say
 
but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here
 
I say nothing
 
he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you
 
I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know
 
though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do
 

 

 W.S. Merwin reads his poem "Yesterday."

Term
 
At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through
all its uses and circumstances to
utter at last that meaning of its own
for which it had long been the only word
though it seems now that any word would do

 
Language
 
Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture. Like our marrow, and the color in our veins. We shine the lantern of our sleep on them, to make sure, and there they are, trembling already for the day of witness. They will be buried with us, and rise with the rest.
 
 
 
Memorandum
 
Save these words for a while because
of something they remind you of
although you cannot remember
what that is a sense that is part
dust and part the light of morning
 
you were about to say a name
and it is not there I forget
them too I am learning to pray
to Perdita to whom I said
nothing at the time and now she
cannot hear me as far as I
know but the day goes on looking
 
the names often change more slowly
than the meanings whole families
grow up in them and then are gone
into the anonymous sky
oh Perdita does the hope go on
after the names are forgotten
 
and is the pain of the past done
when the calling has stopped and those
betrayals so long repeated
that they are taken for granted
as the shepherd does with the sheep
 
 
 
Thanks
 
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
 
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
 
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
 
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
 
 
In Time
 
The night the world was going to end
when we heard those explosions not far away
and the loudspeakers telling us
about the vast fires on the backwater
consuming undisclosed remnants
and warning us over and over
to stay indoors and make no signals
you stood at the open window
the light of one candle back in the room
we put on high boots to be ready
for wherever we might have to go
and we got out the oysters and sat
at the small table feeding them
to each other first with the fork
then from our mouths to each other
until there were none and we stood up
and started to dance without music
slowly we danced around and around
in circles and after a while we hummed
when the world was about to end
all those years all those nights ago
 

Before The Flood
 
Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming

 
Rain Light
 
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning
 

 

W.S.Merwin reads his poem "Rain Light”. 

Touching the Tree

 
Faces are bending over me asking why
 
they do not live here they do not know anything
there is a black river beyond the buildings
watching everything from one side
it is moving while I touch the tree
 
the black river says no my father says no
my mother says no in the streets they say nothing
they walk past one at a time in hats
with their heads down
it is wrong to answer them through the green fence
the street cars go by singing to themselves I am iron
the broom seller goes past in the sound of grass
by the tree touching the tree I hear the tree
I walk with the tree
we talk without anything
 
come late echoes of ferries chains whistles
tires on the avenue wires humming among windows
words flying out of rooms
 
the stones of the wall are painted white to be better
but at the foot of the tree in the fluttering light
I have dug a cave for a lion
a lion cave so that the cave will be there
among roots waiting when the lion comes to the tree
 
 
 
Sire
 
 
Here comes the shadow not looking where it is going,
And the whole night will fall; it is time.
Here comes the little wind which the hour
Drags with it everywhere like an empty wagon through leaves.
Here comes my ignorance shuffling after them
Asking them what they are doing.
 
Standing still, I can hear my footsteps
Come up behind me and go on
Ahead of me and come up behind me and
With different keys clinking in the pockets,
And still I do not move. Here comes
The white-haired thistle seed stumbling past through the branches
Like a paper lantern carried by a blind man.
I believe it is the lost wisdom of my grandfather
Whose ways were his own and who died before I could ask.
 
Forerunner, I would like to say, silent pilot,
Little dry death, future,
Your indirections are as strange to me
As my own. I know so little that anything
You might tell me would be a revelation.
 
Sir, I would like to say,
It is hard to think of the good woman
Presenting you with children, like cakes,
Granting you the eye of her needle,
Standing in doorways, flinging after you
Little endearments, like rocks, or her silence
Like a whole Sunday of bells. Instead, tell me:
Which of my many incomprehensions
Did you bequeath me, and where did they take you? Standing
In the shoes of indecision, I hear them
Come up behind me and go on ahead of me
Wearing boots, on crutches, barefoot, they could never
Get together on any door-sill or destination—
The one with the assortment of smiles, the one
Jailed in himself like a forest, the one who comes
Back at evening drunk with despair and turns
Into the wrong night as though he owned it—oh small
Deaf disappearance in the dusk, in which of their shoes
Will I find myself tomorrow?
 
 
 
 
Berryman
 
 
I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war
 
don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity
 
just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice
 
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
 
it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
 
he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England
 
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry
 
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
 
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
 
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

 

Night Singing
 
 
Long after Ovid’s story of Philomela
      has gone out of fashion and after the testimonials
of Hafiz and Keats have been smothered in comment
      and droned dead in schools and after Eliot has gone home
from the Sacred Heart and Ransom has spat and consigned
      to human youth what he reduced to fairy numbers
after the name has become slightly embarrassing
      and dried skins have yielded their details and tapes have been
slowed and analyzed and there is nothing at all
      for me to say one nightingale is singing
nearby in the oaks where I can see nothing but darkness
      and can only listen and ride out on the long note’s
invisible beam that wells up and bursts from its
      unknown star on on on never returning
never the same never caught while through the small leaves
      of May the starlight glitters from its own journeys
once in the ancestry of this song my mother visited here
      lightning struck the locomotive in the mountains
it had never happened before and there were so many
      things to tell that she had just seen and would never
have imagined now a field away I hear another
      voice beginning and on the slope there is a third
not echoing but varying after the lives
      after the goodbyes after the faces and the light
after the recognitions and the touching and tears
      those voices go on rising if I knew I would hear
in the last dark that singing I know how I would listen
 

 
Air
 
 
Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.
 
This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.
 
I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.
 
Young as I am, old as I am,
 
I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.
 
This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.
 
 

The Nails
 
 
I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall
Like a calendar in one color.
I wear a torn place on my sleeve.
It isn’t as simple as that.
 
Between no place of mine and no place of yours
You’d have thought I’d know the way by now
Just from thinking it over.
Oh I know
I’ve no excuse to be stuck here turning
Like a mirror on a string,
Except it’s hardly credible how
It all keeps changing.
Loss has a wider choice of directions
Than the other thing.
 
As if I had a system
I shuffle among the lies
Turning them over, if only
I could be sure what I’d lost.
I uncover my footprints, I
Poke them till the eyes open.
They don’t recall what it looked like.
When was I using it last?
Was it like a ring or a light
Or the autumn pond
Which chokes and glitters but
Grows colder?
It could be all in the mind.  Anyway
Nothing seems to bring it back to me.
 
And I’ve been to see
Your hands as trees borne away on a flood,
The same film over and over,
And an old one at that, shattering its account
To the last of the digits, and nothing
And the blank end.
 
The lightning has shown me the scars of the future.
 
I’ve had a long look at someone
Alone like a key in a lock
Without what it takes to turn.
 
It isn’t as simple as that.
 
Winter will think back to your lit harvest
For which there is no help, and the seed
Of eloquence will open its wings
When you are gone.
But at this moment
When the nails are kissing the fingers good-bye
And my only
Chance is bleeding from me,
When my one chance is bleeding,
For speaking either truth or comfort
I have no more tongue than a wound.

 

 The Burnt Child

 
Matches among other things that were not allowed
never would be
lying high in a cool blue box
that opened in other hands and there they all were
bodies clean and smooth blue heads white crowns
white sandpaper on the sides of the box scoring
fire after fire gone before
 
I could hear the scratch and flare
when they were over
and catch the smell of the striking
I knew what the match would feel like
lighting
when I was very young
 
a fire engine came and parked
in the shadow of the big poplar tree
on Fourth Street one night
keeping its engine running
pumping oxygen to the old woman
in the basement
when she died the red lights went on burning
 
 

Vixen
 
 
Comet of stillness princess of what is over
       high note held without trembling without voice without sound
aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets
       of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences
never caught in words warden of where the river went
       touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished
window onto the hidden place and the other time
       at the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting
in the full moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born
       you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me
you are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you
       even now you are unharmed even now perfect
as you have always been now when your light paws are running
       on the breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you
when I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer
       when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars
from the creeds of difference and the contradictions
       that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications
as long as it lasted until something that we were
       had ended when you are no longer anything
let me catch sight of you again going over the wall
       and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures
guttering on a screen let my words find their own
       places in the silence after the animals
 
 

 
The River of Bees
 
In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blindman followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older
 
Soon it will be fifteen years
 
He was old he will have fallen into his eyes
 
I took my eyes
A long way to the calendars
Room after room asking how shall I live
 
One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name
 
Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say
 
He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass
 
I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay
 
He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water
 
We are the echo of the future
 
On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live
 
 

A Door

 
This is a place where a door might be
here where I am standing
In the light outside all the walls
 
there would be a shadow here
all day long
and a door into it
where now there is me
 
and somebody would come and knock
on this air
long after I have gone
and there in front of me a life
would open
 
 
 
Whenever I Go There

 
Whenever I go there everything is changed
 
The stamps on the bandages the titles
Of the professors of water
 
The portrait of Glare the reasons for
The white mourning
 
In new rocks new insects are sitting
With the lights off
And once more I remember that the beginning
 
Is broken
 
No wonder the addresses are torn
 
To which I make my way eating the silence of animals
Offering snow to the darkness
 
Today belongs to few and tomorrow to no one
 
 
 
 
The Night of the Shirts
 
 
Oh pile of white shirts who is coming
to breathe in your shapes to carry your numbers
to appear
what hearts
are moving toward their garments here
their days
what troubles beating between arms
 
you look upward through
each other saying nothing has happened
and it has gone away and is sleeping
having told the same story
and we exist from within
eyes of the gods
 
you lie on your backs
and the wounds are not made
the blood has not heard
the boat has not turned to stone
and the dark wires to the bulb
are full of the voice of the unborn
 
 
 
 
For The Anniversary Of My Death
 
 
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star
 
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

About his life  
 
Poets.org

 

On his work  and  more poems.

Poetry Foundation 

When You Go Away: Remembering W. S. Merwin. By  Kevin Young. The New Yorker
March 20, 2019. 

The Merwin Conservancy is a small and thriving arts and ecology organization on the island of Maui. It conserves both an extraordinary place—a lush and rare, 19-acre palm forest that two-time Pulitzer prize winning poet W.S. Merwin beckoned into being from land designated as agricultural wasteland  —and it conserves the sense of wonder that brought forth both Merwin’s poetry, and his garden.