W.s. Merwin Quotes

Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

What you remember saves you.

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree

Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.

part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain

Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

How beautiful you must be to have been able to lead me this far with only the sound of your going away

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been

Tell me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are

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

You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us

A BIRTHDAY Something continues and I don't know what to call it though the language is full of suggestions in the way of language but they are all anonymous and it's almost your birthday music next to my bones these nights we hear the horses running in the rain it stops and the moon comes out and we are still here the leaks in the roof go on dripping after the rain has passed smell of ginger flowers slips through the dark house down near the sea the slow heart of the beacon flashes the long way to you is still tied to me but it brought me to you I keep wanting to give you what is already yours it is the morning of the mornings together breath of summer oh my found one the sleep in the same current and each waking to you when I open my eyes you are what I wanted to see.

I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here

My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.

turning the pages patiently in search of meanings

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

Utterance" Sitting over words Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing Not far Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark The echo of everything that has ever Been spoken Still spinning its one syllable Between the earth and silence

So this is what I am Pondering his eyes that could not Conceive that I was a creature to run from I who have always believed too much in words

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.

I try to hear you remembering that we are not separate to find you who cannot be lost or elsewhere or incomplete

What I remember I cannot tell though it is there in all that I say

I offer you what I have my Poverty

We keep asking where they have gone those years we remember and we reach for them like hands in the night

Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for —W. S. Merwin

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.

I have no way of telling what I miss I am the only one who misses it

the dead are not separate from the living each has one foot in the unknown and cannot speak for the other

Inside this pencil crouch words that have never been written never been spoken never been taught they’re hiding they’re awake in there dark in the dark hearing us but they won’t come out not for love not for time not for fire even when the dark has worn away they’ll still be there hiding in the air multitudes in days to come may walk through them breathe them be none the wiser what script can it be that they won’t unroll in what language would I recognize it would I be able to follow it to make out the real names of everything maybe there aren’t many it could be that there’s only one word and it’s all we need it’s here in this pencil every pencil in the world is like this

In my youth I believed in somewhere else I put my faith in travel now I am becoming my own tree

A garden is made of hope.

When I was me I remembered I could remember what was not there but may have been there once

After an age of leaves and feathers someone dead thought of the mountain as money and cut the trees that were here and the wind and the rain at night. It is hard to say it.

I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere

My cradle was a shoe.

where will the meanings be when the words are forgotten will I see again where you are

all these years I have looked through your limbs to the river below and the roofs and the night and you were the way I saw the world

As though it had always been forbidden to remember each of us grew up knowing nothing about the beginning

with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridge 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 looking out in different 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 in a culture up to its chin in shame living in the stench it has chosen 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 back door and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you in the banks that use us we are saying thank you with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable unchanged 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 like the earth 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

where will the meanings be when the words are forgotten

I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.

...The silence of a place where there were once horses is a mountain and I have seen by lightning that ever mountain once fell from the air ringing like the chime of an iron shoe...

apparently we believe in the words and through them but we long beyond them for what is unseen what remains out of reach what is kept covered

Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, it’s appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows. It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished.

I have come back through the years to this stone hollow encrypted in its own stillness I hear it without listening

Going too fast for myself I missed more than I think I can remember almost everything it seems sometimes and yet there are chances that come back that I did not notice when they stood where I could have reached out and touched them

For a Coming Extinction Gray whale Now that we are sending you to The End That great god Tell him That we who follow you invented forgiveness And forgive nothing I write as though you could understand And I could say it One must always pretend something Among the dying When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks Empty of you Tell him that we were made On another day The bewilderment will diminish like an echo Winding along your inner mountains Unheard by us And find its way out Leaving behind it the future Dead And ours When you will not see again The whale calves trying the light Consider what you will find in the black garden And its court The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless And fore-ordaining as stars Our sacrifices Join your word to theirs Tell him That it is we who are important

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

But is it really you behind the pretenses beyond dust and distances beneath the salt and the siren announcements and ancient impurities and decays that claim to be you

...and I was looking up out of a time of late blessings

On the door it says what to do to survive But we were not born to survive Only to live

A visitor to a garden sees the successes, usually. The gardener remembers mistakes and losses, some for a long time, and imagines the garden in a year, and in an unimaginable future.

We begin to say something that cannot be said. When you see on the front page a woman in Iraq who's just seen her husband blown up, you see her there, her mouth wide open, you know the sound coming out of her, a howl of grief and pain -- that's the beginning of language. Trying to express that, it's inexpressible, and poetry is really to say what can't be said. And that's why people turn to it in these moments. They don't know how to say this, [but] part of them feels that maybe a poem will say it. It won't say it, but it'll come closer to saying it than anything else will. I think there are always two sides, and one of them is the unsayable. The utterly singular. Who you are; who you can never tell anybody. And on the other hand, there is what you can express. How do we know about this thing we talk about? Because we talk about it. We're using words. And the words never say it, but the words are all we have to say it.

I look for you my curl of sleep my breathing wave on the night shore my star in the fog of morning I think you can always find me I call to you under my breath I whisper to you through the hours all your names my ear of shadow I think you can always hear me I wait for you my promised day my time again my homecoming my being where you wait for me I think always of you waiting

The wind lifts the whole branch of the poplar carries it up and out and holds it there while each leaf is the whole tree reaching from its roots in the dark earth out through all its rings of memory to where it has never been

endless patience will never be enough the only hope is to be the daylight

this is the white wind that you cannot believe here it is and the owl sails out to see whose turn it is tonight to be changed

but happiness has a shape made of air / it was never owned by anyone / it comes when it will in its own time — W.S. Merwin, from “December Morning,” Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

Traveling Together" If we are separated, I will try to wait for you on your side of things your side of the wall and the water and of the light moving at its own speed even on leaves that we have seen I will wait on one side while a side is there

I believe in the ordinary day that is here at this moment and is me I do not see it going its way but I never saw how it came to me it extends beyond whatever I may think I know and all that is real to me it is the present that it bears away where has it gone when it has gone from me there is no place I know outside today except for the unknown all around me the only presence that appears to stay everything that I call mine it lent me even the way that I believe the day for as long as it is here and is me

To Paula in Late Spring" Let me imagine that we will come again when we want to and it will be spring we will be no older than we ever were the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud through which the morning slowly comes to itself and the ancient defenses against the dead will be done with and left to the dead at last the light will be as it is now in the garden that we have made here these years together of our long evenings and astonishment

I turned to the room and in the light from the street beheld one beautiful bare breast of a friend's friend gently rising and falling as though I were not there already not there

even there a shining is flowing from all the stones though the eyes are not yet made that can see it

To remember Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never Has fallen silent.

The gods are what has failed to become of us

Everything that does not need you is real

we trust without giving it a thought that we will always see it as we see it once and that what we know is only a moment of what is ours and will stay we believe it as the moment slips away as lengthening shadows merge in the valley and a window kindles there like a first star what we see again comes to us in secret

If we knew the point where something is going to break, where the thread of kisses will be cut, where a look will no longer meet another, where the heart will leap toward another place, we could put another point on that point or at least go with it to its breaking. — Roberto Juarroz, from “7,” Vertical Poetry Vol 4. Translated by W.S. Merwin. (North Point Press September 1988)

Place" On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree what for not for the fruit the tree that bears the fruit is not the one that was planted I want the tree that stands in the earth for the first time with the sun already going down and the water touching its roots in the earth full of the dead and the clouds passing one by one over its leaves

The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.

Another To Echo” How beautiful you must be to have been able to lead me this far with only the sound of your going away heard once at a time and then remembered in silence when the time was gone you whom I have never seen o forever invisible one whom I have never mistaken for another voice nor hesitated to follow beyond precept and prudence over seas and deserts you incomparable one for whom the waters fall and the winds search and the words were made listening — W.S. Merwin, The Moon Before Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)

In my loving dying heart a twilight is coming, a last ray, gently reproaching. from Stone: 24 By Osip Mandelstam Translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin

here is the known hand again knowing remembering at night after the doubting and the news of age

we know from the beginning that the darkness is beyond us there is no explaining the dark it is only the light that we keep feeling a need to account for

for a time beyond measure there were no rooms and now many have forgotten the sky

Place" On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree what for not the fruit the tree that bears the fruit is not the one that was planted I want the tree that stands in the earth for the first time with the sun already going down and the water touching its roots in the earth full of the dead and the clouds passing one by one over its leaves

When I think of the patience I have had back in the dark before I remember or knew it was night until the light came all at once at the speed it was born to with all the time in the world to fly through not concerned about ever arriving and then the gathering of the first stars unhurried in their flowering spaces and far into the story the planets cooling slowly and the ages of rain then the seas starting to bear memory the gaze of the first cell at its waking how did this haste begin this little time at any time this reading by lightning scarcely a word this nothing this heaven

As those who are gone now keep wandering through our words sounds of paper following them at untold distances so I wake again in the old house where at times I have believed that I was waiting for myself and many years have gone taking with them the semblance of youth reason after reason ranges of blue hills who did I think was missing those days neither here nor there my own dog waiting to be known

Summer" Be of this brightness dyed Whose unrecking fever Flings gold before it goes Into voids finally That have no measure. Bird-sleep moonset, Island after island, Be of their hush On this tide that balance A time, for a time. Islands are not forever, Nor this light again, Tide-set, brief summer, Be of their secret That fears no other.

Voices Over Water" There are spirits that come back to us when we have grown into another age we recognize them just as they leave us we remember them when we cannot hear them some of them come from the bodies of birds some arrive unnoticed like forgetting they do not recall earlier lives and there are distant voices still hoping to find us

Late in May as the light lengthens toward summer the young goldfinches flutter down through the day for the first time to find themselves among fallen petals cradling their day’s colors in the day’s shadows of the garden beside the old house

How It Happens” The sky said I am watching to see what you can make out of nothing I was looking up and I said I thought you were supposed to be doing that the sky said Many are clinging to that I am giving you a chance I was looking up and I said I am the only chance I have then the sky did not answer and here we are with our names for the days the vast days that do not listen to us

Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning" There are questions that I no longer ask and others that I have not asked for a long time that I return to and dust off and discover that I’m smiling and the question has always been me and that it is no question at all but that it means different things at the same time yes I am old now and I am the child I remember what are called the old days and there is no one to ask how they became the old days and if I ask myself there is no answer so this is old and what I have become and the answer is something I would come to later when I was old but this morning is not old and I am the morning in which the autumn leaves have no question as the breeze passes through them and is gone

To The Rain" You reach me out of the age of the air clear falling toward me each one new if any of you has a name it is unknown but waited for you here that long for you to fall through it knowing nothing hem of the garment do not wait until I can love all that I am to know for maybe that will never be touch me this time let me love what I cannot know as the man born blind may love color until all that he loves fills him with color

Trees” 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

There are spirits that come back to us when we have grown into another age we recognize them just as they leave us we remember them when we cannot hear them some of them come from the bodies of birds some arrive unnoticed like forgetting they do not recall earlier lives and there are distant voices still hoping to find us — W.S. Merwin, “Voices Over Water,” Garden Time. (Copper Canyon Press September 13, 2016)

All night while the rain fell the dark valley heard in silence the silent valley did not remember you were asleep beside me while the rain fell all around us I listened to you breathing I wanted to remember the sound of your breath but we lay there forgetting asleep and awake forgetting a breath at a time while the rain went on falling around us. — W.S. Merwin, from “The Sound of Forgetting,” Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

…Preserve my eyes, which are irreplaceable. Preserve my heart, veins, bones, Against the slow death building in them like hornets until the place is entirely theirs. Preserve my tongue and I will bless you again and again…

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

…Let all lights but yours be nothing to me. Let the memory of tongues not unnerve me so that I stumble or quake. But lead me at times beside the still waters; There when I crouch to drink let me catch a glimpse of your image Before it is obscured with my own…

Youth OSIP MANDELSTAM Translated by W. S. Merwin Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for or what to call you I think I did not even know I was looking how would I have known you when I saw you as I did time after time when you appeared to me as you did naked offering yourself entirely at that moment and you let me breathe you touch you taste you knowing no more than I did and only when I began to think of losing you did I recognize you when you were already part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you from what we cannot hold the stars are made

W. S. Merwin said, “Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened and elated moments. People turn to poetry in times of crisis because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said. In expressing the inexpressible poetry remains close to the origins of language.

October" I remember how I would say, “I will gather These pieces together, Any minute now I will make A knife out of a cloud.” Even then the days Went leaving their wounds behind them, But, “Monument,” I kept saying to the grave, “I am still your legend.” There was another time When our hands met and the clocks struck And we lived on the point of a needle, like angels. I have seen the spider’s triumph In the palm of my hand. Above My grave, that thoroughfare, There are words now that can bring My eyes to my feet, tamed. Beyond the trees wearing names that are not their own The paths are growing like smoke. The promises have gone, Gone, gone, and they were here just now. There is the sky where they laid their fish. Soon it will be evening.

Unchopping a Tree. Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nests that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places. It is not arduous work, unless major limbs have been smashed or mutilated. If the fall was carefully and correctly planned, the chances of anything of the kind happening will have been reduced. Again, much depends upon the size, age, shape, and species of the tree. Still, you will be lucky if you can get through this stages without having to use machinery. Even in the best of circumstances it is a labor that will make you wish often that you had won the favor of the universe of ants, the empire of mice, or at least a local tribe of squirrels, and could enlist their labors and their talents. But no, they leave you to it. They have learned, with time. This is men's work. It goes without saying that if the tree was hollow in whole or in part, and contained old nests of bird or mammal or insect, or hoards of nuts or such structures as wasps or bees build for their survival, the contents will have to repaired where necessary, and reassembled, insofar as possible, in their original order, including the shells of nuts already opened. With spider's webs you must simply do the best you can. We do not have the spider's weaving equipment, nor any substitute for the leaf's living bond with its point of attachment and nourishment. It is even harder to simulate the latter when the leaves have once become dry — as they are bound to do, for this is not the labor of a moment. Also it hardly needs saying that this the time fro repairing any neighboring trees or bushes or other growth that might have been damaged by the fall. The same rules apply. Where neighboring trees were of the same species it is difficult not to waste time conveying a detached leaf back to the wrong tree. Practice, practice. Put your hope in that. Now the tackle must be put into place, or the scaffolding, depending on the surroundings and the dimension of the tree. It is ticklish work. Almost always it involves, in itself, further damage to the area, which will have to be corrected later. But, as you've heard, it can't be helped. And care now is likely to save you considerable trouble later. Be careful to grind nothing into the ground. At last the time comes for the erecting of the trunk. By now it will scarcely be necessary to remind you of the delicacy of this huge skeleton. Every motion of the tackle, every slightly upward heave of the trunk, the branches, their elaborately reassembled panoply of leaves (now dead) will draw from you an involuntary gasp. You will watch for a lead or a twig to be snapped off yet again. You will listen for the nuts to shift in the hollow limb and you will hear whether they are indeed falling into place or are spilling in disorder — in which case, or in the event of anything else of the kind — operations will have to cease, of course, while you correct the matter. The raising itself is no small enterprise, from the moment when the chains tighten around the old bandages until the boles hands vertical above the stump, splinter above splinter. How the final straightening of the splinters themselves can take place (the preliminary work is best done while the wood is still green and soft, but at times when the splinters are not badly twisted most of the straightening is left until now, when the torn ends are face to face with each other). When the splinters are perfectly complementary the appropriate fixative is applied. Again we have no duplicate of the original substance. Ours is extremely strong, but it is rigid. It is limited to surfaces, and there is no play in it. However the core is not the part of the trunk that conducted life from the roots up to the branches and back again. It was relatively inert. The fixative for this part is not the same as the one for the outer layers and the bark, and if either of these is involved