W. S. Merwin

Let me call a ghost, Love, so it be little: In December we took No thought for the weather. Whom now shall I thank For this wealth of water? Your heart loves harbors Where I am a stranger. Where was it we lay Needing no other Twelve days and twelve nights In each other’s eyes? Or was it at Babel And the days too small We spoke our own tongue Needing no other? If a seed grow green Set a stone upon it That it learn thereby Holy charity. If you must smile Always on that other, Cut me from ear to ear And we all smile together.

What is the head a. Ash What are the eyes a. The wells have fallen in and have Inhabitants What are the feet a. Thumbs left after the auction No what are the feet a. Under them the impossible road is moving Down which the broken necked mice push Balls of blood with their noses What is the tongue a. The black coat that fell off the wall With sleeves trying to say something What are the hands a. Paid No what are the hands a. Climbing back down the museum wall To their ancestors the extinct shrews that will Have left a message What is the silence a. As though it had a right to more Who are the compatriots a. They make the stars of bone

Four feet up, under the bruise-blue Fingered hat-felt, the eyes begin. The sly brim Slips over the sky, street after street, and nobody Knows, to stop it. It will cover The whole world, if there is time. Fifty years’ Start in gray the eyes have; you will never Catch up to where they are, too clever And always walking, the legs not long but The boots big with wide smiles of darkness Going round and round at their tops, climbing. They are almost to the knees already, where There should have been ankles to stop them. So must keep walking all the time, hurry, for The black sea is down where the toes are And swallows and swallows all. A big coat Can help save you. But eyes push you down; never Meet eyes. There are hands in hands, and love Follows its furs into shut doors; who Shall be killed first? Do not look up there: The wind is blowing the building-tops, and a hand Is sneaking the whole sky another way, but It will not escape. Do not look up. God is On High. He can see you. You will die.

Here comes the shadow not looking where it is going, And the whole night will fall; it is time. Here comes the little wind which the hour Drags with it everywhere like an empty wagon through leaves. Here comes my ignorance shuffling after them Asking them what they are doing. Standing still, I can hear my footsteps Come up behind me and go on Ahead of me and come up behind me and With different keys clinking in the pockets, And still I do not move. Here comes The white-haired thistle seed stumbling past through the branches Like a paper lantern carried by a blind man. I believe it is the lost wisdom of my grandfather Whose ways were his own and who died before I could ask. Forerunner, I would like to say, silent pilot, Little dry death, future, Your indirections are as strange to me As my own. I know so little that anything You might tell me would be a revelation. Sir, I would like to say, It is hard to think of the good woman Presenting you with children, like cakes, Granting you the eye of her needle, Standing in doorways, flinging after you Little endearments, like rocks, or her silence Like a whole Sunday of bells. Instead, tell me: Which of my many incomprehensions Did you bequeath me, and where did they take you? Standing In the shoes of indecision, I hear them Come up behind me and go on ahead of me Wearing boots, on crutches, barefoot, they could never Get together on any door-sill or destination— The one with the assortment of smiles, the one Jailed in himself like a forest, the one who comes Back at evening drunk with despair and turns Into the wrong night as though he owned it—oh small Deaf disappearance in the dusk, in which of their shoes Will I find myself tomorrow?

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

In a dream I returned to the river of bees Five orange trees by the bridge and Beside two mills my house Into whose courtyard a blindman followed The goats and stood singing Of what was older Soon it will be fifteen years He was old he will have fallen into his eyes I took my eyes A long way to the calendars Room after room asking how shall I live One of the ends is made of streets One man processions carry through it Empty bottles their Image of hope It was offered to me by name Once once and once In the same city I was born Asking what shall I say He will have fallen into his mouth Men 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 real Nor the noise of death drawing water We are the echo of the future On the door it says what to do to survive But we were not born to survive Only to live

Long after Ovid’s story of Philomela has gone out of fashion and after the testimonials of Hafiz and Keats have been smothered in comment and droned dead in schools and after Eliot has gone home from the Sacred Heart and Ransom has spat and consigned to human youth what he reduced to fairy numbers after the name has become slightly embarrassing and dried skins have yielded their details and tapes have been slowed and analyzed and there is nothing at all for me to say one nightingale is singing nearby in the oaks where I can see nothing but darkness and can only listen and ride out on the long note’s invisible beam that wells up and bursts from its unknown star on on on never returning never the same never caught while through the small leaves of May the starlight glitters from its own journeys once in the ancestry of this song my mother visited here lightning struck the locomotive in the mountains it had never happened before and there were so many things to tell that she had just seen and would never have imagined now a field away I hear another voice beginning and on the slope there is a third not echoing but varying after the lives after the goodbyes after the faces and the light after the recognitions and the touching and tears those voices go on rising if I knew I would hear in the last dark that singing I know how I would listen

Oh pile of white shirts who is coming to breathe in your shapes to carry your numbers to appear what hearts are moving toward their garments here their days what troubles beating between arms you look upward through each other saying nothing has happened and it has gone away and is sleeping having told the same story and we exist from within eyes of the gods you lie on your backs and the wounds are not made the blood has not heard the boat has not turned to stone and the dark wires to the bulb are full of the voice of the unborn

Neither my father nor my mother knew the names of the trees where I was born what is that I asked and my father and mother did not hear they did not look where I pointed surfaces of furniture held the attention of their fingers and across the room they could watch walls they had forgotten where there were no questions no voices and no shade Were there trees where they were children where I had not been I asked were there trees in those places where my father and my mother were born and in that time did my father and my mother see them and when they said yes it meant they did not remember What were they I asked what were they but both my father and my mother said they never knew

I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall Like a calendar in one color. I wear a torn place on my sleeve. It isn’t as simple as that. Between no place of mine and no place of yours You’d have thought I’d know the way by now Just from thinking it over. Oh I know I’ve no excuse to be stuck here turning Like a mirror on a string, Except it’s hardly credible how It all keeps changing. Loss has a wider choice of directions Than the other thing. As if I had a system I shuffle among the lies Turning them over, if only I could be sure what I’d lost. I uncover my footprints, I Poke them till the eyes open. They don’t recall what it looked like. When was I using it last? Was it like a ring or a light Or the autumn pond Which chokes and glitters but Grows colder? It could be all in the mind.  Anyway Nothing seems to bring it back to me. And I’ve been to see Your hands as trees borne away on a flood, The same film over and over, And an old one at that, shattering its account To the last of the digits, and nothing And the blank end. The lightning has shown me the scars of the future. I’ve had a long look at someone Alone like a key in a lock Without what it takes to turn. It isn’t as simple as that. Winter will think back to your lit harvest For which there is no help, and the seed Of eloquence will open its wings When you are gone. But at this moment When the nails are kissing the fingers good-bye And my only Chance is bleeding from me, When my one chance is bleeding, For speaking either truth or comfort I have no more tongue than a wound.