Quotes from W.S. Merwin

but happiness has a shape made of air / it was never owned by anyone / it comes when it will in its own time — W.S. Merwin, from "December Morning," Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

Trees" I am looking at trees they may be one of the things I will miss most from the earth though many of the ones I have seen already I cannot remember and though I seldom embrace the ones I see and have never been able to speak with one I listen to them tenderly their names have never touched them they have stood round my sleep and when it was forbidden to climb them they have carried me in their branches

for a time beyond measure there were no rooms and now many have forgotten the sky

In the cities the birds are forgotten among other things but then one could say that the cities are made of absences of what disappeared so they could be there

The Hydra calls me but I am used to it It calls me Everybody But I know my name and do not answer

The thing that makes poetry different from all other arts [is that] you're using language, which is what you use for everything else--telling lies and selling socks, advertising and conducting law. Whereas we don't write little concerti to each other, or paint pictures.

How long ago the day is when at last I look at it with the time it has taken to be there still in it

what I live for I can seldom believe in

all I did not know went on beginning around me I had thought it would come later but it had been waiting

Preserve my eyes, which are irreplaceable. Preserve my heart, veins, bones, Against the slow death building in them like hornets until the place is entirely theirs. Preserve my tongue and I will bless you again and again…

by day the known world lost color my hold on it felt loose I imagine that was part of the grief I knew

Let all lights but yours be nothing to me. Let the memory of tongues not unnerve me so that I stumble or quake. But lead me at times beside the still waters; There when I crouch to drink let me catch a glimpse of your image Before it is obscured with my own…

There are spirits that come back to us when we have grown into another age we recognize them just as they leave us we remember them when we cannot hear them some of them come from the bodies of birds some arrive unnoticed like forgetting they do not recall earlier lives and there are distant voices still hoping to find us — W.S. Merwin, "Voices Over Water," Garden Time . (Copper Canyon Press September 13, 2016)

All night while the rain fell the dark valley heard in silence the silent valley did not remember you were asleep beside me while the rain fell all around us I listened to you breathing I wanted to remember the sound of your breath but we lay there forgetting asleep and awake forgetting a breath at a time while the rain went on falling around us. — W.S. Merwin, from "The Sound of Forgetting," Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

Ancient World" Orange sunset in the deep shell of summer a long silence reaching across the dry pastures in the distance a dog barks at the sound of a door closing and at once I am older.

To The Hand" What the eye sees is a dream of sight what it wakes to is a dream of sight and in the dream for every real lock there is only one real key and it's in some other dream now invisible it's the key to the one real door it opens the water and the sky both at once it's already in the downward river with my hand on it my real hand and I am saying to the hand turn open the river

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.

Testimone Voglio raccontare di com'erano le foreste Dovrò parlare in una lingua dimenticata p#109

Once I came back to the leaves just as they were falling into the rattling of magpies and the waving flights through treetops beyond the long field tawny with stubble a scatter of sheep wandered there circling slowly as a galaxy ferrying the gray lights that were theirs wading into their shadows with the stalks whispering under them and the day shining out of the straw

I do not think I am fond, Father, Of the way in which always before he listens He prepares himself by listening. It is Unequal, Father, like the reason For which the wheel turns, though there is no wheel.

I know how words are, how they go everywhere, one hint is enough. They talk of love, what do they know? We have the morsel and the knife.

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree what for not for the fruit the tree that bears the fruit is not the one that was planted I want the tree that stands in the earth for the first time with the sun already going down and the water touching its roots in the earth full of the dead and the clouds passing one by one over its leaves

you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

In each world they may put us Farther apart Do not die As this world is made I might Live forever