w.s. merwin - poemshechicollege.weebly.com/uploads/8/1/3/5/8135843/ws_merwin_poetry.pdfw.s. merwin....

Classic Poetry Series

W.S. Merwin

- poems -

Publication Date:

2004

Publisher:

PoemHunter.Com - The World's Poetry Archive

http://www.PoemHunter.com

www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 2

Air

Naturally it is night.Under the overturned lute with itsOne string I am going my wayWhich has a strange sound.

This way the dust, that way the dust.I listen to both sidesBut I keep right on.I remember the leaves sitting in judgmentAnd 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 wallGrowing through the immortelles.I forget silenceThe owner of the smile.

This must be what I wanted to be doing,Walking at night between the two deserts,Singing.

W.S. Merwin



Any Time

How long ago the day iswhen at last I look at itwith the time it has takento be there still in itnow in the transparent lightwith the flight in the voicesthe beginning in the leaveseverything I rememberand before it before mepresent at the speed of lightin the distance that I amwho keep reaching out to itseeing all the time fasterwhere it has never stirred frombefore there is anythingthe darkness thinking the light

W.S. Merwin



Before The Flood

Why did he promise methat we would build ourselvesan ark all by ourselvesout in back of the houseon New York Avenuein Union City New Jerseyto the singing of the streetcarsafter the storyof Noah whom nobodybelieved about the watersthat would rise over everythingwhen I told my fatherI wanted us to buildan ark of our own therein the back yard underthe kitchen could we do thathe told me that we couldI want to I said and will wehe promised me that we wouldwhy did he promise thatI wanted us to start thennobody will believe usI said that we are buildingan ark because the rainsare coming and that was truenobody ever believedwe would build an ark therenobody would believethat the waters were coming

W.S. Merwin



Beggars And Kings

In the eveningall the hours that weren't usedare emptied outand the beggars are waiting to gather them upto open themto find the sun in each oneand teach it its beggar's nameand sing to it It is wellthrough the night

but each of ushas his own kingdom of painsand has not yet found them alland is sailing in search of them day and nightinfallible undisputed unrestingfilled with a dumb useand its timelike a finger in a world without hands

W.S. Merwin



December Night

The cold slope is standing in darknessBut the south of the trees is dry to the touch

The heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathersI came to watch theseWhite plants older at nightThe oldestCome first to the ruins

And I hear magpies kept awake by the moonThe water flows through itsOwn fingers without end

Tonight once moreI find a single prayer and it is not for men

W.S. Merwin



For A Coming Extinction

Gray whaleNow that we are sinding you to The EndThat great godTell himThat we who follow you invented forgivenessAnd forgive nothing

I write as though you could understandAnd I could say itOne must always pretend somethingAmong the dyingWhen you have left the seas nodding on their stalksEmpty of youTell him that we were madeOn another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echoWinding along your inner mountainsUnheard by usAnd find its way outLeaving behind it the futureDeadAnd ours

When you will not see againThe whale calves trying the lightConsider what you will find in the black gardenAnd its courtThe sea cows the Great Auks the gorillasThe irreplaceable hosts ranged countlessAnd fore-ordaining as starsOur sacrificesJoin your work to theirsTell himThat it is we who are important

W.S. Merwin



For The Anniversary Of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the dayWhen the last fires will wave to meAnd the silence will set outTireless travellerLike the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longerFind myself in life as in a strange garmentSurprised at the earthAnd the love of one womanAnd the shamelessness of menAs today writing after three days of rainHearing the wren sing and the falling ceaseAnd bowing not knowing to what

W.S. Merwin



Green Fields

By this part of the century few are left who believe in the animals for they are not there in the carved partsof them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks are sounds of shadows that possess no futurethere is still game for the pleasure of killing and there are pets for the children but the lives that followedcourses of their own other than ours and older have been migrating before us some are alreadyfar on the way and yet Peter with his gaunt cheeks and point of white beard the face of an aged LawrencePeter who had lived on from another time and country and who had seen so many things set out and vanishstill believed in heaven and said he had never once doubted it since his childhood on the farm in the daysof the horses he had not doubted it in the worst times of the Great War and afterward and he had cometo what he took to be a kind of earthly model of it as he wandered south in his sixtiesby that time speaking the language well enough for them to make him out he took the smallest roadsinto a world he thought was a thing of the past with wildflowers he scarcely remembered and neighborsworking together scything the morning meadows turning the hay before the noon meal bringing it inby milking time husbandry and abundance all the virtues he admired and their reward bounteousin the eyes of a foreigner and there he remained for the rest of his days seeing what he wanted to seeuntil the winter when he could no longer fork the earth in his garden and then he gave awayhis house land everything and committed himself to a home to die in an old chateau where he lingeredfor some time surrounded by those who had lost the use of body or mind and as he lay there he told methat the wall by his bed opened almost every day and he saw what was really there and it was eternal lifeas he recognized at once when he saw the gardens he had made and the green fields where he had beena child and his mother was standing there then the wall would close and around him again were the last days of the world

W.S. Merwin



It Is March

It is March and black dust falls out of the booksSoon I will be goneThe tall spirit who lodged here hasLeft alreadyOn the avenues the colorless thread lies underOld prices

When you look back there is always the pastEven when it has vanishedBut when you look forwardWith your dirty knuckles and the winglessBird on your shoulderWhat can you write

The bitterness is still rising in the old minesThe fist is coming out of the eggThe thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses

At a certain heightThe tails of the kites for a moment areCovered with footsteps

Whatever I have to do has not yet begun

W.S. Merwin



My Friends

My friends without shields walk on the target

It is late the windows are breaking

My friends without shoes leaveWhat they loveGrief moves among them as a fire amongIts bellsMy friends without clocks turnOn the dial they turnThey part

My friends with names like gloves set outBare handed as they have livedAnd nobody knows themIt is they that lay the wreaths at the milestones it is theirCups that are found at the wellsAnd are then chained up

My friends without feet sit by the wallNodding to the lame orchestraBrotherhood it says on the decorationsMy friend without eyes sits in the rain smilingWith a nest of salt in his hand

My friends without fathers or houses hearDoors opening in the darknessWhose halls announce

Behold the smoke has come home

My friends and I have in commonThe present a wax bell in a wax belfryThis message telling ofMetals thisHunger for the sake of hunger this owl in the heartAnd these hands oneFor asking one for applause

My friends with nothing leave it behindIn a boxMy friends without keys go out from the jails it is nightThey take the same road they missEach other they invent the same banner in the darkThey ask their way only of sentries too proud to breathe

At dawn the stars on their flag will vanish

The water will turn up their footprints and the day will riseLike a monument to myFriends the forgotten



W.S. Merwin



Some Last Questions

What is the head A. AshWhat are the eyes A. The wells have fallen in and have InhabitantsWhat are the feet A. Thumbs left after the auctionNo what are the feet A. Under them the impossible road is moving Down which the broken necked mice push Balls of blood with their nosesWhat is the tongue A. The black coat that fell off the wall With sleeves trying to say somethingWhat are the hands A. PaidNo what are the hands A. Climbing back down the museum wall To their ancestors the extinct shrews that will Have left a messageWhat is the silence A. As though it had a right to moveWho are the compatriots A. They make the stars of bone

W.S. Merwin



Term

At the last minute a word is waitingnot heard that way before and not to berepeated or ever be rememberedone that always had been a household wordused in speaking of the ordinaryeveryday recurrences of livingnot newly chosen or long consideredor a matter for comment afterwardwho would ever have thought it was the onesaying itself from the beginning throughall its uses and circumstances toutter at last that meaning of its ownfor which it had long been the only wordthough it seems now that any word would do

W.S. Merwin



The Burnt Child

Matches among other things that were not allowednever would belying high in a cool blue boxthat opened in other hands and there they all werebodies clean and smooth blue heads white crownswhite sandpaper on the sides of the box scoringfire after fire gone before

I could hear the scratch and flarewhen they were overand catch the smell of the strikingI knew what the match would feel likelightingwhen I was very young

a fire engine came and parkedin the shadow of the big poplar treeof Fourth Street one nightkeeping its engine runningpumping oxygen to the old womanin the basementwhen she died the red lights went on burning

W.S. Merwin



The River Of Bees

In a dream I returned to the river of beesFive orange trees by the bridge andBeside two mills my houseInto whose courtyard a blind man followedThe goats and stood singingOf what was older

Soon it will be fifteen years

He was old he will have fallen into his eyes

I took my eyesA long way to the calendersRoom after room asking how shall I live

One of the ends is made of streetsOne man processions carry through itEmpty bottles theirImages of hopeIt was offered to me by name

Once once and onceIn the same city I was bornAsking what shall I say

He will have fallen into his mouthMen 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 realNor the noise of death drawing water

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to surviveBut we were not born to surviveOnly to live

W.S. Merwin



The Source

There in the fringe of trees betweenthe upper field and the edge of the onebelow it that runs above the valleyone time I heard in the earlydays of summer the clear ringingsix notes that I knew were the openingof the Fingal's Cave OvertureI heard them again and again that yearand the next summer and the yearafterward those six descendingnotes the same for all the changingin my own life since the last timeI had heard them fall past me fromthe bright air in the morning of a birdand I believed that what I had heardwould always be there if I came againto be overtaken by that seasonin that place after the winterand I would wonder again whetherMendelssohn really had heard them somewherefar to the north that many years agolooking up from his youth to listen tothose six notes of an ancestorspilling over from a presence neitherwater nor human that led to the cavein his mind the fluted cliffs and the wavegoing out and the falling waterhe thought those notes could be the music forMendelssohn is gone and Fingal is goneall but his name for a cave and for onepiece of music and the black-capped warbleras we called that bird that I remembersinging there those notes descendingfrom the age of the ice drippingI have not heard again this year can itbe gone then will I not hear itfrom now on will the overture beginfor a time and all those who listenfeel that falling in them but as alwayswithout knowing what they recognize

W.S. Merwin



The Speed Of Light

So gradual in those summers was the going of the age it seemed that the long days setting outwhen the stars faded over the mountains were not leaving us even as the birds woke in full song and the dewglittered in the webs it appeared then that the clear morning opening into the sky was something of oursto have and keep and that the brightness we could not touch and the air we could not hold had come to be there all the timefor us and would never be gone and that the axle we did not hear was not turning when the ancient carcoughed in the roofer's barn and rolled out echoing first thing into the lane and the only tractorin the village rumbled and went into its rusty mutterings before heading out of its lean-tointo the cow pats and the shadow of the lime tree we did not see that the swallows flashing and the sparksof their cries were fast in the spokes of the hollow wheel that was turning and turning us taking usall away as one with the tires of the baker's van where the wheels of bread were stacked like days in calendarscoming and going all at once we did not hear the rim of the hour in whatever we were sayingor touching all day we thought it was there and would stay it was only as the afternoon lengthened on itsdial and the shadows reached out farther and farther from everything that we began to listen for whatmight be escaping us and we heard high voices ringing the village at sundown calling their animals homeand then the bats after dark and the silence on its road

W.S. Merwin



Unknown Bird

Out of the dry daysthrough the dusty leavesfar across the valleythose few notes neverheard here before

one fluted phrasefloating over itswandering secretall at once wells upsomewhere else

and is gone before itgoes on fallen intoits own echo leavinga hollow through the airthat is dry as before

where is it fromhardly anyoneseems to have noticed itso far but who nowwould have been listening

it is not native herethat may be the onething we are sure ofit came from somewhereelse perhaps alone

so keeps on calling forno one who is herehoping to be heardby another of its ownunlikely origin

trying once more the same fewnotes that began the songof an oriole last heardyears ago in anotherexistence there

it goes again tellno one it is hereforeign as we arewho are filling the dayswith a sound of our own

W.S. Merwin



Vehicles

This is a place on the way after the distances can no longer be kept straight here in this dark cornerof the barn a mound of wheels has convened along raveling courses to stop in a single momentand lie down as still as the chariots of the Pharaohs some in pairs that rolled as one over the same roadsto the end and never touched each other until they arrived here some that broke by themselves and were leftuntil they could be repaired some that went only to occasions before my time and some that have spunacross other countries through uncounted summers now they go all the way back together the tallcobweb-hung models of galaxies in their rings of rust leaning against the stone hail from Rene'smanure cart the year he wanted to store them here because there was nobody left who could make them like thatin case he should need them and there are the carriage wheels that Merot said would be worth a lot some dayand the rim of the spare from bald Bleret's green Samson that rose like Borobudur out of the high grassbehind the old house by the river where he stuffed mattresses in the morning sunlight and the hensscavenged around his shoes in the days when the black top-hat sedan still towered outside Sandeau's cow barnwith velvet upholstery and sconces for flowers and room for two calves instead of the back seat when their time came

W.S. Merwin



When You Go Away

When you go away the wind clicks around to the northThe painters work all day but at sundown the paint fallsShowing the black wallsThe clock goes back to striking the same hourThat has no place in the years

And at night wrapped in the bed of ashesIn one breath I wakeIt is the time when the beards of the dead get their growthI remember that I am fallingThat I am the reasonAnd that my words are the garment of what I shall never beLike the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy

W.S. Merwin



Whenever I Go There

Whenever I go there everything is changed

The stamps on the bandages the titlesOf the professors of water

The portrait of Glare the reasons forThe white mourning

In new rocks new insects are sittingWith the lights offAnd 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 animalsOffering snow to the darkness

Today belongs to few and tomorrow to no one

W.S. Merwin



Wish

The star in myHand is falling

All the uniforms know what's no use

May I bow to Necessity notTo her hirelings

W.S. Merwin



Yesterday

My friend says I was not a good sonyou understandI say yes I understand

he says I did not goto see my parents very often you knowand I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he saysmaybe I would go there oncea month or maybe even lessI say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my fatherI say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my fatherhe was asking me about my lifehow I was making out and hewent into the next roomto get something to give me

oh I sayfeeling again the coldof my father's hand the last time

he says and my father turnedin the doorway and saw melook at my wristwatch and hesaid you know I would like you to stayand talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he saidI don't want you to feel that youhave tojust because I'm here

I say nothing

he says my fathersaid maybeyou have important work you are doingor maybe you should be seeingsomebody I don't want to keep you

I look out the windowmy friend is older than I amhe says and I told my father it was soand I got up and left him thenyou know



though there was nowhere I had to goand nothing I had to do

W.S. Merwin


Table of ContentsCOVERAirAny TimeBefore The FloodBeggars And KingsDecember NightFor A Coming ExtinctionFor The Anniversary Of My DeathGreen FieldsIt Is MarchMy FriendsSome Last QuestionsTermThe Burnt ChildThe River Of BeesThe SourceThe Speed Of LightUnknown BirdVehiclesWhen You Go AwayWhenever I Go ThereWishYesterday

w.s. merwin - poemshechicollege.weebly.com/uploads/8/1/3/5/8135843/ws_merwin_poetry.pdfw.s. merwin....

Documents