Stir
Next
to you in the
green blue-
grass, I could
almost trust
that we
had sunk
deep
into the flesh
of some other
But in this
light of not quite
mourning,
when I wake, blue-
faced and buried
beneath your bed
of thin nails,
I have become
nothing
more than skin,
ten half-
moons, blue
memory.
*****************
I've included this poem here for my friend, Leigh, because I know she's been concerned with some of her work in and of couplets and has been grappling with craft. I wrote this poem during a very rough time in my life. My marriage was falling apart; I was trying to get through a difficult and demanding graduate program; I was trying to be a good mother for my young son; I was just in the beginning of what would be a horrible and all-consuming, years-long struggle with serious alcoholism. Quite frankly, I'm surprised I actually came out on the other side of all that. But, hey, we've all got our battle scars... Right?
Spaces in poems so wide you can fall into depth and live there.
ReplyDeleteTo the Blank Spaces
by W. S. Merwin
For longer than by now I can believe
I assumed that you had nothing to do
with each other I thought you had arrived
whenever that had been
more solitary than single snowflakes
with no acquaintance or understanding
running among you guiding your footsteps
somewhere ahead of me
in your own time oh white lakes on the maps
that I copied and gaps on the paper
for the names that were to appear in them
sometimes a doorway or
window sometimes an eye sometimes waking
without knowing the place in the whole night
I might have guessed from the order in which
you turned up before me
and from the way I kept looking at you
as though I recognized something in you
that you were all words out of one language
tracks of the same creature
------------------------------
How space and silence can gather us into the center of itself and that's where we get okay.
I don't write right now. But there are spaces. I'm looking at them now, chiseled, the statue free from the stone, lovely.
Something kind in all of this...
How lovely. (Your poem, but the previous commment, too.)I love the waking in the "light of not quite mourning" and those "ten half-moons, blue memory."
ReplyDeleteIt's gorgeous and moving.
@Logan: I dreamt of you last night. Space and silence, interlaced like fingers. They will hold water, and water hones stone.
ReplyDelete@Lori: "Gorgeous and moving." I am blushing and flattered. Thank you so very much.