Quotes from W.S. Merwin

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

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

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

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

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

A garden is made of hope.

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

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

My cradle was a shoe.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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