Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.
This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgement
And then winter.
I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.
Young as I am, old as I am,
I forget tomorrow, the blind man,
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.
This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between two deserts,
Singing.
W.S. Merwin
Merwin published his first book of poems in 1952, and his last in 2016. He won two Pulitzer Prizes--in 1971 and 2009. This poem is comparatively early in the incredible span of his writing life, first published in his 1963 volume The Moving Target. It is included in the collection The Essential W.S. Merwin, published in 2017. It was included in the 1969 anthology Naked Poetry, edited by Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey, which is where I first saw it. It is accompanied in that anthology by this photo of the poet as a young man.
The word "immortelles" means "everlasting" and is the name of a tree, and of papery flowers like those of this Caribbean tree, as the tree with orange blossoms in the top photo.
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