W. S. Merwin

The way to the river leads past the names of Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges Through the song of the bandage vendor I lay your name by my voice As I go The way to the river leads past the late Doors and the games of the children born looking backwards They play that they are broken glass The numbers wait in the halls and the clouds Call From windows They play that they are old they are putting the horizon Into baskets they are escaping they are Hiding I step over the sleepers the fires the calendars My voice turns to you I go past the juggler’s condemned building the hollow Windows gallery Of invisible presidents the same motion in them all In a parked cab by the sealed wall the hats are playing Sort of poker with somebody’s Old snapshots game I don’t understand they lose The rivers one After the other I begin to know where I am I am home Be here the flies from the house of the mapmaker Walk on our letters I can tell And the days hang medals between us I have lit our room with a glove of yours be Here I turn To your name and the hour remembers Its one word Now Be here what can we Do for the dead the footsteps full of money I offer you what I have my Poverty To the city of wires I have brought home a handful Of water I walk slowly In front of me they are building the empty Ages I see them reflected not for long Be here I am no longer ashamed of time it is too brief its hands Have no names I have passed it I know Oh Necessity you with the face you with All the faces

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

With what stillness at last you appear in the valley your first sunlight reaching down to touch the tips of a few high leaves that do not stir as though they had not noticed and did not know you at all then the voice of a dove calls from far away in itself to the hush of the morning so this is the sound of you here and now whether or not anyone hears it this is where we have come with our age our knowledge such as it is and our hopes such as they are invisible before us untouched and still possible

When you are already here you appear to be only a name that tells of you whether you are present or not and for now it seems as though you are still summer still the high familiar endless summer yet with a glint of bronze in the chill mornings and the late yellow petals of the mullein fluttering on the stalks that lean over their broken shadows across the cracked ground but they all know that you have come the seed heads of the sage the whispering birds with nowhere to hide you to keep you for later you who fly with them you who are neither before nor after you who arrive with blue plums that have fallen through the night perfect in the dew

Thank you but not just at the moment I know you will say I have said that before I know you have been there all along somewhere in another time zone I studied once those beautiful instructions when I was young and far from here they seemed distant then they seem distant now from everything I remember I hope they stayed with you when the noose started to tighten and you could say no more and after wisdom and the days of iron the eyes started from your head I know the words must have been set down partly for yourself unjustly condemned after a good life I know the design of the world is beyond our comprehension thank you but grief is selfish and in the present when the stars do not seem to move I was not listening I know it is not sensible to expect fortune to grant her gifts forever I know

For longer than by now I can believe I assumed that you had nothing to do with each other I thought you had arrived whenever that had been more solitary than single snowflakes with no acquaintance or understanding running among you guiding your footsteps somewhere ahead of me in your own time oh white lakes on the maps that I copied and gaps on the paper for the names that were to appear in them sometimes a doorway or window sometimes an eye sometimes waking without knowing the place in the whole night I might have guessed from the order in which you turned up before me and from the way I kept looking at you as though I recognized something in you that you were all words out of one language tracks of the same creature

In the cards and at the bend in the road we never saw you in the womb and in the crossfire in the numbers whatever you had your hand in which was everything we were told never to put our faith in you to bow to you humbly after all because in the end there was nothing else we could do but not to believe in you still we might coax you with pebbles kept warm in the hand or coins or the relics of vanished animals observances rituals not binding upon you who make no promises we might do such things only not to neglect you and risk your disfavor oh you who are never the same who are secret as the day when it comes you whom we explain as often as we can without understanding

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 taking our 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 thank you we are saying and waving dark though it is

All the way north on the train the sun followed me followed me without moving still the sun of that other morning when we had gone over Come on over men at the screen door said to my father You have to see this it’s an ape bring the little boy bring the boy along so he brought me along to the field of dry grass hissing behind the houses in the heat that morning and there was nothing else back there but the empty day above the grass waving as far away as I could see and the sight burned my eyes white birds were flying off beyond us and a raised floor of boards like a house with no house on it part way out there was shining by itself a color of shadow and the voices of the men were smaller in the field as we walked on something was standing out there on the floor the men kept saying Come on over it’s on a chain and my father said to me Don’t get too close I saw it was staring down at each of our faces one after the other as though it might catch sight of something in one of them that it remembered I stood watching its eyes as they turned away from each of us

Thinking of rain clouds that rose over the city on the first day of the year in the same month I consider that I have lived daily and with eyes open and ears to hear these years across from St Vincent’s Hospital above whose roof those clouds rose its bricks by day a French red under cross facing south blown-up neo-classic facades the tall dark openings between columns at the dawn of history exploded into many windows in a mortised face inside it the ambulances have unloaded after sirens’ howling nearer through traffic on Seventh Avenue long ago I learned not to hear them even when the sirens stop they turn to back in few passers-by stay to look and neither do I at night two long blue windows and one short one on the top floor burn all night many nights when most of the others are out on what floor do they have anything I have seen the building drift moonlit through geraniums late at night when trucks were few moon just past the full upper windows parts of the sky as long as I looked I watched it at Christmas and New Year early in the morning I have seen the nurses ray out through arterial streets in the evening have noticed internes blocks away on doorsteps one foot in the door I have come upon the men in gloves taking out the garbage at all hours piling up mountains of plastic bags white strata with green intermingled and black I have seen one pile catch fire and studied the cloud at the ends of the jets of the hoses the fire engines as near as that red beacons and machine-throb heard by the whole body I have noticed molded containers stacked outside a delivery entrance on Twelfth Street whether meals from a meal factory made up with those mummified for long journeys by plane or specimens for laboratory examination sealed at the prescribed temperatures either way closed delivery and approached faces staring from above crutches or tubular clamps out for tentative walks have paused for turtling wheel-chairs heard visitors talking in wind on each corner while the lights changed and hot dogs were handed over at the curb in the middle of afternoon mustard ketchup onions and relish and police smelling of ether and laundry were going back and I have known them all less than the papers of our days smoke rises from the chimneys do they have an incinerator what for how warm do they believe they have to maintain the air in there several of the windows appear to be made of tin but it may be the light reflected I have imagined bees coming and going on those sills though I have never seen them who was St Vincent