ink & light

The old walls half fallen sink away under brambles

     and ivy and trail off into oak woods that have been

coming back for them through all the lives whose daylight

     has vanished into the mosses there was a life once

in which I lived here part of a life believing

     in it partly as though it were the whole story

and so not a story at all and partly knowing

     that I clung to it only in passing as in

the words of a story and that partly I was still

     where I had come from and when I come back now later

and find it still here it seems to be a story

     I know but no longer believe and that is my place in it

- W.S. Merwin

When it seems that the world is made of a single

     summer as it always has been and that the gray leaves

will hang that same way without moving above the empty

     road until the end while the wheat goes on standing 

in its sleep with no dreams soundless and shining into

     the hovering day along the stopped film of the river

and when the doors facing south have turned to stone every one

     and the parched syllable of cicadas through the hush

of fields stand still in the light and from shuttered

     windows voices sift like the settling of dust

all at once the blank sky will be half dark with the black

     cloud welling out of which a cold wind rolls and the first

thunder splits all around to build upon it’s own

     deafening echoes then suddenly the light will be only

the weight of rain cascading shot through with lightning

     at that time if you are away from home and can stumble

to any house they will let you in to a dark room

     that will close behind you at the heart of the roar

and you will see as through water an unknown face but you

     will hear no sound it makes and behind it others

will be looking up in silence from around a table

     knowing nothing about you except why you are there

- W.S. Merwin

There was a life several turns before this one

     and it woke to these seasons these same flowers this rain

these branches and roots of feeling that divide and divide again

     reaching into the ruins into the treasures

and palaces of ruin and I knew the way then

     to a hundred ruins I could walk to in an hour

each with its own country and prospect its own birds

     and silence and in every roof part of the sky

that was the day I had come to be standing in

     which no one who had been born there had lived to see

whatever they may have watched from those hollow windows

     and coveted on those stairs that led up at last into trees

clear light went on staring out of the stone basins

     recalling clouds and I was in a future no one from there

could have conceived of or believed when they were sure

     that they would be there in it just as they were then

and not as strangers too long ago to be anyone

- W.S. Merwin