Songs From The Wood

One afternoon, when grief still hurt but not like bright sunlight, when parenting was just a synonym for exhaustion, a voice came out of the radio. An older voice, a voice that felt like it had known grief and beauty, love and loss. The voice said:

Almost to your birthday and as I
am getting dressed alone in the house
a button comes off and once I find
a needle with an eye big enough
for me to try to thread it
and at last have sewed the button on
I open an old picture of you
who always did such things by magic
one photograph found after you died
of you at twenty
beautiful in a way
I would never see
for that was nine years
before I was born
but the picture has
faded suddenly
spots have marred it
maybe it is past repair
I have only what I remember

The last line was the jolt of caffeine, stirring me from my slumber of exhausted days. He was saying what I had been struggling with since Kitty’s death: that I’d lose Kitty again once my memories of him started to fade. I have only what I remember. He was giving voice to what I fight even now in my time with Maya. It’ll not be long before I’ll not remember all her baby things, the way she is now. I have only what I remember.

The voice belonged to William Stanley Merwin and he read a poem “A Likeness” from his recent collection of poems, The Shadow of Sirius. Two other poems that he read aloud in the interview made me head to the local library for a copy.

Poems and lines flew off the page, lodging themselves in my brain in a way that few poems have.

part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
From what we cannot hold the stars are made – from Youth

Time unseen time our continuing fiction
however we tell it eludes our dear hope and our reason – from Secrets

As those who are gone now
keep wandering through our words – from The Morning Hills

Like William Stafford, a poet who I’ve often written about, his poems are meditations. A few words of it and I am a willing vessel, ready to carry whatever the day has to offer.

W.S. Merwin

(Image from flickr, thanks to cpacker66).

I obtained a collection of Merwin’s works called Migration. The book stayed with me all through the nine weeks it takes before the book must be returned to the library. After two more withdrawals from the library, I finally purchased the book.

Merwin’s poems run the gamut of human emotions and subjects. He can write just about being:

I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me
I do not see it going its own way
but I never saw how it came to me – from A Momentary Creed

Of the moment when we’re more alive than the sum of all the other days:

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else – from One of the Butterflies

He can write about the beauty that we live immersed in, say a raindrop:

touch me this time
let me love what I cannot know
as the man born blind may love color
until all that he loves
fills him with color – from To The Rain

About the sorrow at an animal’s coming extinction:

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 – from For A Coming Extinction

Or of the loss of a rainforest:

I want to tell what the forests
were like
I will have to speak
in a forgotten language – from Witness

Or of the attraction of war:

When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again – from When The War is Over

Or of fairy tales, mystical one:

Stories come to us like new senses
a wave and an ash tree were sisters
they had been separated since they were children
but they went on believing in each other
though each was sure that the other must be lost – from Recognitions

Or of a lifetime spent together:

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 – from To Paula in Late Spring

The words, their arrangement. I want to hold them, running each one slowly through my mind, luxuriating in them. I want to be ensconced in them.

Very early on, Merwin let go of all punctuation in his poems. Read like this, eyes searching for the breaks, his poems take on an almost mystical quality, a freshness that never disappears. For example, consider the opening lines from the poem, The Emigre:

You will find it is
much as you imagined
in some respects
which no one can predict
you will be homesick
at times for something you can describe
and at times without being able to say
what you miss
just as you used to feel when you were at home

You can read a break after “in some respects”, reiterate that line and finish the rest of the stanza with one message. You can read a break after “imagined” and the poem reads well again. You can read a break after “predict” and the still the poem reads well. Each echoes a slightly different nuance of the same theme. Reread the two lines from “Secret” quoted above and you can play a similar game.

Merwin was born in the early years of the past century (how long ago it sounds, when I say ‘past century’). He came of age during WWII and enlisted in the army at age 17. Then, he realized what war meant and became a pacifist and refused to fight in the war. A crime for which he was sent to a mental institution. When I heard that, I was shocked. Here were a people, calling themselves the denizens of the greatest country in the world, thinking it was insane that someone refused to kill on order. Stafford too had refused to fight the same war and had been sent to a labor camp for that. In 1971, Merwin donated the money from his first Pulitzer Prize to fighting the draft, against the Vietnam War.

He eschwed a life in the academia and instead went to study Zen Buddhism in Maui and stayed back. He lives in a solar powered home that he built with his wife, Paula Schwartz, on an abandoned pineapple farm. He also worked to restore the neighboring rainforest of palm trees. He writes on scraps of paper with a pencil. He says that writing on a fresh sheet of paper or a typewriter is too much pressure to produce something deep and meaningful. With scraps of paper, anything is good. Stafford said similar things.

His poems, like Stafford’s, come from a place that lives on ideas like these, ideas of non-violence, ecology, a deep communion with all things alive, of living well and dying well. The sound of those poems stirs something deep in me, something that I cannot always access directly, but must come by obliquely.

Merwin’s output is prodigious by any standard: 25 volumes of just poetry. He also has nearly two dozen books of translations, 8 works of prose, and a memoir, “Summer Doorways.”. His output is also as varied as you can imagine.  Migration, a collection of his poems from 1952 to 2005, contains poems that are just a single line and poems that span double digit pages. He has written an entire novel in verse, The Folding Cliffs, about the history and legends of Hawaii.

In his interview with Bill Moyers, Merwin says: “… poetry always comes out of what you don’t know. And with students I say, knowledge is very important. Learn languages. Read history. Read, listen, above all, listen to everybody. Listen to everything that you hear. Every sound in the street. Every bird and every dog and everything that you hear. But know all of your knowledge is important, but your knowledge will never make anything. It will help you to form the things, but what makes something is something that you will never know. It comes out of you. It’s who you are.” Watch the whole interview. I found it a fascinating commentary on a life and the writing process.

These days, I’m a thief. I steal time. Mostly from Maya and Shanthala, but also from work, from all that calls to me all day, every day. I find little time to read long works of fiction or non-fiction. I switched to reading short stories and essays to better fit the time I could make. With poets like Stafford and Merwin, I find I can squeeze in an intense session in just a couple of minutes, reading that peels away the layers of my life, my self.

Who did I think was listening
when I wrote down the words
in pencil at the beginning
words for singing
to music I did not know
and people I did not know
would read them and stand to sing them
already knowing them
while they sing they have no names – from From the Start