Quotes from W.S. Merwin

Seperation Your absence has gone trough me like thread trough a needle. Everything I do is stiched with it's color.

Please one more kiss in the kitchen before we turn the lights off

your note is the time of your radiance arriving once just as the sun does

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…" ?W.S. Merwin

one morning near the end of spring among the invisible unheard stars I sing this one time with the hope that is here in every breath may these notes be heard another morning in another life in another spring together

The sun sets in the cold without friends Without reproaches after all it has done for us It goes down believing in nothing When it has gone I hear the stream running after it It has brought its flute it is a long way

now there is only the river that was always on its own way

my love was always woven with leaving

For the Anniversay of My Death" 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

Waking Hanging upward into the rushing summer Calling -- Everything is The answer Too fast --

In my youth I believed in somewhere else I put faith in travel now I am becoming my own tree — W.S. Merwin, from "Wild Oats," The Moon Before Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)

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

All through the dark the wind looks for the grief it belongs to but there was no place for that any more I have looked too and seen only the nameless hunger watching us out of the stars ancestor and the black fields —W.S. Merwin, "Night Wind" The Second Four Books of Poems . (Copper Canyon Press, 1992)

How We Are Spared" At midsummer before the dawn an orange light returns to the mountains Like a great weight and the small birds cry out And bear it up

A long time ago the lightening was practicing Something I thought was easy

Looking East at Night" Death White hand The moths fly at in the darkness I took you for the moon rising Whose light then do you reflect As though it came out of the roots of things This harvest pallor in which I have no shadow but myself

The old bottles lay dreaming of new wine. I picked up my breast, which had gone out. By other lights I go looking for yours Through the standing harvest of my lost arrows...

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write — W.S. Merwin, from "Berryman," Flower & Hand: Poems, 1977-1983 (Copper Canyon Press; English Language edition October 1, 1996)

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

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.

part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you