W. S. Merwin

Save these words for a while because of something they remind you of although you cannot remember what that is a sense that is part dust and part the light of morning you were about to say a name and it is not there I forget them too I am learning to pray to Perdita to whom I said nothing at the time and now she cannot hear me as far as I know but the day goes on looking the names often change more slowly than the meanings whole families grow up in them and then are gone into the anonymous sky oh Perdita does the hope go on after the names are forgotten and is the pain of the past done when the calling has stopped and those betrayals so long repeated that they are taken for granted as the shepherd does with the sheep

The night the world was going to end when we heard those explosions not far away and the loudspeakers telling us about the vast fires on the backwater consuming undisclosed remnants and warning us over and over to stay indoors and make no signals you stood at the open window the light of one candle back in the room we put on high boots to be ready for wherever we might have to go and we got out the oysters and sat at the small table feeding them to each other first with the fork then from our mouths to each other until there were none and we stood up and started to dance without music slowly we danced around and around in circles and after a while we hummed when the world was about to end all those years all those nights ago

It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young Though I have long wondered what it would be like To be me now No older at all it seems from here As far from myself as ever Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing I imagine all the clocks have died in the night Now no one is looking I could choose my age It would be younger I suppose so I am older It is there at hand I could take it Except for the things I think I would do differently They keep coming between they are what I am They have taught me little I did not know when I was young There is nothing wrong with my age now probably It is how I have come to it Like a thing I kept putting off as I did my youth There is nothing the matter with speech Just because it lent itself To my uses Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning

When Hans Hofmann became a hedgehog somewhere in a Germany that has vanished with its forests and hedgerows Shakespeare would have been a young actor starting out in a country that was only a word to Hans who had learned from those who had painted animals only from hearing tales about them without ever setting eyes on them or from corpses with the lingering light mute and deathly still forever held fast in the fur or the feathers hanging or lying on a table and he had learned from others who had arranged the corpses of animals as though they were still alive in full flight or on their way but this hedgehog was there in the same life as his own looking around at him with his brush of camel hair and his stretched parchment of sheepskin as he turned to each sharp particular quill and every black whisker on the long live snout and those flat clawed feet made only for trundling and for feeling along the dark undersides of stones and as Hans took them in he turned into the Hans that we would see

I live up here And a little bit to the left And I go down only For the accidents and then Never a moment too soon Just the same it's a life it's plenty The stairs the petals she loves me Every time Nothing has changed Oh down there down there Every time The glass knights lie by their gloves of blood In the pans of the scales the helmets Brim over with water It's perfectly fair The pavements are dealt out the dice Every moment arrive somewhere You can hear the hearses getting lost in lungs Their bells stalling And then silence comes with the plate and I Give what I can Feeling It's worth it For I see What my votes the mice are accomplishing And I know I'm free This is how I live Up here and simply Others do otherwise Maybe

Back when it took all day to come up from the curving broad ponds on the plains where the green-winged jaçanas ran on the lily pads easing past tracks at the mouths of gorges crossing villages silted in hollows in the foothills each with its lime-washed church by the baked square of red earth and its talkers eating fruit under trees turning a corner and catching sight at last of inky forests far above steep as faces with the clouds stroking them and the glimmering airy valleys opening out of them waterfalls still roared from the folds of the mountain white and thundering and spray drifted around us swirling into the broad leaves and the waiting boughs once I took a tin cup and climbed the sluiced rocks and mossy branches beside one of the high falls looking up step by step into the green sky from which rain was falling when I looked back from a ledge there were only dripping leaves below me and flowers beside me the hissing cataract plunged into the trees holding on I moved closer left foot on a rock in the water right foot on a rock in deeper water at the edge of the fall then from under the weight of my right foot came a voice like a small bell singing over and over one clear treble syllable I could feel it move I could feel it ring in my foot in my skin everywhere in my ears in my hair I could feel it in my tongue and in the hand holding the cup as long as I stood there it went on without changing when I moved the cup still it went on when I filled the cup in the falling column still it went on when I drank it rang in my eyes through the thunder curtain when I filled the cup again when I raised my foot still it went on and all the way down from wet rock to wet rock green branch to green branch it came with me until I stood looking up and we drank the light water and when we went on we could still hear the sound as far as the next turn on the way over

From the kindness of my parents I suppose it was that I held that belief about suffering imagining that if only it could come to the attention of any person with normal feelings certainly anyone literate who might have gone to college they would comprehend pain when it went on before them and would do something about it whenever they saw it happen in the time of pain the present they would try to stop the bleeding for example with their own hands but it escapes their attention or there may be reasons for it the victims under the blankets the meat counters the maimed children the animals the animals staring from the end of the world

On a road through the mountains with a friend many years ago I came to a curve on a slope where a clear stream flowed down flashing across dark rocks through its own echoes that could neither be caught nor forgotten it was the turning of autumn and already the mornings were cold with ragged clouds in the hollows long after sunrise but the pasture sagging like a roof the glassy water and flickering yellow leaves in the few poplars and knotted plum trees were held up in a handful of sunlight that made the slates on the silent mill by the stream glisten white above their ruin and a few relics of the life before had been arranged in front of the open mill house to wait pale in the daylight out on the open mountain after whatever they had been made for was over the dew was drying on them and there were few who took that road who might buy one of them and take it away somewhere to be unusual to be the only one to become unknown a wooden bed stood there on rocks a cradle the color of dust a cracked oil jar iron pots wooden wheels iron wheels stone wheels the tall box of a clock and among them a ring of white stone the size of an embrace set into another of the same size an iron spike rising from the ring where the wooden handle had fitted that turned it in its days as a hand mill you could see if you looked closely that the top ring that turned in the other had been carved long before in the form of a fox lying nose in tail seeming to be asleep the features worn almost away where it had gone around and around grinding grain and salt to go into the dark and to go on and remember * * * What I thought I had left I kept finding again but when I went looking for what I thought I remembered as anyone could have foretold it was not there when I went away looking for what I had to do I found that I was living where I was a stranger but when I retraced my steps the familiar vision turned opaque and all surface and in the wrong places and the places where I had been a stranger appeared to me to be where I had been at home called by name and answering getting ready to go away and going away * * * Every time they assembled and he spoke to them about waking there was an old man who stood listening and left before the others until one day the old man stayed and Who are you he asked the old man and the old man answered I am not a man many lives ago I stood where you are standing and they assembled in front of me and I spoke to them about waking until one day one of them asked me When someone has wakened to what is really there is that person free of the chain of consequences and I answered yes and with that I turned into a fox and I have been a fox for five hundred lives and now I have come to ask you to say what will free me from the body of a fox please tell me when someone has wakened to what is really there is that person free of the chain of consequences and this time the answer was That person sees it as it is then the old man said Thank you for waking me you have set me free of the body of the fox which you will find on the other side of the mountain I ask you to bury it please as one of your own that evening he announced a funeral service for one of them but they said nobody has died then he led them to the other side of the mountain and a cave where they found a fox’s body and he told them the story and they buried the fox as one of them but later one of them asked what if he had given the right answer every time * * * Once again I was there and once again I was leaving and again it seemed as though nothing had changed even while it was all changing but this time was a time of ending this time the long marriage was over the orbits were flying apart it was autumn again sunlight tawny in the fields where the shadows each day grew longer and the still afternoons ripened the distance until the sun went down across the valley and the full moon rose out of the trees it was the time of year when I was born and that evening I went to see friends for the last time and I came back after midnight along the road white with the moon I was crossing the bars of shadow and seeing ahead of me the wide silent valley full of silver light and there just at the corner of the land that I had come back to so many times and now was leaving at the foot of the wall built of pale stone I saw the body stretched in the grass and it was a fox a vixen just dead with no sign of how it had come to happen no blood the long fur warm in the dewy grass nothing broken or lost or torn or unfinished I carried her home to bury her in the garden in the morning of the clear autumn that she had left and to stand afterward in the turning daylight * * * There are the yellow beads of the stonecrops and the twisted flags of dried irises knuckled into the hollows of moss and rubbly limestone on the waves of the low wall the ivy has climbed along them where the weasel ran the light has kindled to gold the late leaves of the cherry tree over the lane by the house chimney there is the roof and the window looking out over the garden summer and winter there is the field below the house there is the broad valley far below them all with the curves of the river a strand of sky threaded through it and the notes of bells rising out of it faint as smoke and there beyond the valley above the rim of the wall the line of mountains I recognize like a line of writing that has come back when I had thought it was forgotten

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me And the silence will set out Tireless traveler Like the beam of a lightless star Then I will no longer Find myself in life as in a strange garment Surprised at the earth And the love of one woman And the shamelessness of men As today writing after three days of rain Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease And bowing not knowing to what

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