INVOCATION
The day hanging by its feet with a hole
In its voice
And the light running into the sand
Here I am once again with my dry mouth
At the fountain of thistles
Preparing to sing.
WITNESS
I want to tell what the forests
were like
I will have to speak
in a forgotten language
RIVER SOUNDS REMEMBERED
That day the huge water drowned all the voices until
It seemed a kind of silence unbroken
By anything: a time unto itself and still;
So that when I turned away from its roaring, down
The path over the gully, and there were
Dogs barking as always at the edge of town,
Car horns and the cries of children coming
As though for the first time through the fading light
Of the winter dusk, my ears still sang
Like shells with the swingeing current, and
Its flood echoing in me held for long
About me the same silence, by whose sound
I could hear only the quiet under the day
With the land noises floating there far-off and still;
So that even in my mind now turning away
From having listened absently but for so long
It will be the seethe and drag of the river
That I will hear longer than any mortal song.
NO ONE
Who would it surprise
If (after the flash, hush, rush,
Thump, and crumpling) when the wind of prophecy
Lifts its pitch, and over the drifting ash
At last the trump splits the sky,
No One should arise
(No one just as before:
No limbs, eyes, presence;
Mindless and incorruptible) to inherit
Without question the opening heavens,
To be alone, to be complete,
And so forever?
Who had kept our secrets,
Whose wisdom we had heeded,
Who had stood near us (we proved it) again
And again in the dark, to whom we had prayed
Naturally and most often,
Who had escaped our malice―
No more than equitable
By No One to be succeeded,
Who had known our merits, had believed
Our lies, before ourselves whom we had considered
And (after ourselves) had loved
Constantly and well.
LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS AT SUNRISE
When it is not yet day
I am walking on centuries of dead chestnut leaves
In a place without grief
Though the oriole
Out of another life warns me
That I am awake
In the dark while the rain fell
The gold chanterelles pushed through a sleep that was not mine
Waking me
So that I came up the mountain to find them
Where they appear it seems I have been before
I recognize their haunts as though remembering
Another life
Where else am I walking even now
Looking for me
(from Migration)
NO SHADOW
Dogs grief and the love of coffee
lengthen like a shadow of mine
and now that my eyes no longer
swear to anything I look out
through the cloud light of this autumn
and see the valley where I came
first more than half my life ago
oh more than half with its river
a sky in the palm of a hand
never unknown and never known
never mine and not mine
beyond it into the distance
the ridges reflect the clouds now
through a morning without shadows
the river still seems not to move
as though it were the same river
(from Shadow of Sirius)
William Stanley Merwin is a poet, translator, gardener and environmental activist. Among his best known works are his first collection, A Mask for Janus (1952), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Since then his career has spanned six decades and includes twenty titles of translation along with many honors including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award for Poetry, and the Tanning Prize by the Academy of American Poets. In 2010, he was appointed United States Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. Merwin has cultivated and maintained a Zen practice for decades. The poems published here first appeared in his collection, Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005).