#W. S. Merwin
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—W. S. Merwin, from Separation
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Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—W. S. Merwin, from "Separation" in "The Second Four Books of Poem (Copper Canyon Press, 1993)
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Is there a carved throat more radiant than yours?
[...]
I am in the grace of your countenance which my darkness covers with joy.
— René Char, Selected Poems of René Char, transl by W. S. Merwin, (1992)
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Trees
By W. S. Merwin
I am looking at trees
they may be one of the things I will miss
most from the earth
though many of the ones I have seen
already I cannot remember
and though I seldom embrace the ones I see
and have never been able to speak
with one
I listen to them tenderly
their names have never touched them
they have stood round my sleep
and when it was forbidden to climb them
they have carried me in their branches
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W. S. Merwin // "To the New Year"
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I remember a reading W. S. Merwin gave in a tiny chapel, with the audience sitting in the pews, and how after a while we were all lost in a suspension of time—I know I was—and after the reading there was a Q&A and someone asked a bizarre question, she asked what time it was, and Merwin looked at the clock (there was a clock on the wall) and every one of us could see it had stopped, it had stopped in the middle of his reading, literal proof of what we already felt to be true, this spectacular thing, the dream of all poetry, to cut a hole in time.
Mary Ruefle, from “I Remember, I Remember,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey
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W. S. Merwin
it’s from his poem “To Dana with the Gift of a Calendar” collected in his book Finding the Islands!
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Your absence has gone through me.
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W. S. Merwin, from "Separation.'
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summer doorway by W. S. Merwin
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A poem by W. S. Merwin
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
W. S. Merwin
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“Though we know little more about the Gawain poet than his century and his country, the poem is evidence that he once lived and breathed.”
W.S. Merwin, from the Foreword to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
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Oak Time - W. S. Merwin
Storms in absence like the ages before I was anywhere
and out in the shred of forest through the seasons
a few oaks have fallen towering ancients elders
the last of elders standing there while the wars drained away
and slow-dancing with the ice when time had not discovered them
in a scrap of what had been their seamless fabric these late ones
are lying shrouded already in eglantine and brambles
bird-cherry nettles and the tangled ivy
that prophesies disappearance and had already
crept into the shadows they made when they held up their lives
and the nightingales sang here even in the daytime
and cowbells echoed through the long twilight of summer
the ivy knew the way oh the knowing ivy
that was never wrong how few now the birds seem to be
no animals are led out any longer from the barns
after the milking to spend the night pastured here
they are all gone from the village Edouard is gone
who walked out before them to the end of his days
keeping an eye on the walnuts still green along the road
when the owl was safe in these oaks and in the night
I could hear the fox that would bark here bark and be gone
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