Merwin

W. S. Merwin passed away this week, dying peacefully in his sleep at the age of 91.

I have on many occasions in the past had things to say on this blog about Merwin. (If you'd like to take a moment to review them, you can just type "Merwin" in the search bar at the top of the page.) Merwin was an outsized presence in my life. Even though I never met him personally, I saw him read on several occasions, and as a writer and as a human being he was an inspiration and a mentor to me. He was not only a highly original and deeply resonant writer, but he was as well the model of a human being who devoted all of the energies of his life to doing good in and for this world. He spent the last twenty years of his life on the island of Maui doing the work of restoration: taking land that had been stripped and used up for sugar plantations and painstakingly re-introducing native Hawaiian plants to heal the land. That work is documented on the web site of the nonprofit foundation he created to support this work, the Merwin Conservancy. He was a committed and eloquent spokesman for a view of the world which is under siege every day by politicians and businessmen and me-firsters of every stripe who seem to have lost all sense of shame or perspective. Here he speaks of what is at stake:

I believe that our real superiority as a species is not our intelligence itself but the quality of imagination and compassion (in itself perhaps, one of the blessings of language) that allows us to care about the welfare, suffering, survival of lives far from our own, and not immediately or obviously related to our comforts, our prospects, our acquisitions. Whatever we may call the sympathy that involves us with the fate of victims in war zones half a world away, the sonar torture of whales, the mutilation of women and the tortures of bears in Pakistan, or the last members of a species of rainforest honeycreeper, this regard for life apart from our own is something that, so far as I know, is unique to our species. We can glimpse ancestral forms of it in the family and group behavior of other animals, but its broader emergence is a mark of humanity. It is our talent and we have developed it in our own way. It is something that we cannot altogether account for. But if we do not live up to our gifts they do us no good. And what this gift demands of us constantly is a change of heart. What hope there may be depends upon whether or not we can believe in such possibility.
 
from the forward to Remains of a Rainbow: Rare Plants and Animals of Hawaii.

Several of Merwin's poems have worked their way into my life in ways that no other writer's poems have ever done. I'll post two of them today. The first is one that I committed to memory many years ago and which is still perhaps the most powerful tribute to intellectual humility (and the power of wonder) that I have ever encountered in print. (Note: the word maoli, used here as a personification, is a Polynesian word that means what is native or natural or true.):

Search Party 


By now I know most of the faces 
that will appear beside me as 
long as there are still images 
I know at last what I would choose 
the next time if there ever was 
a time again I know the days 
that open in the dark like this 
I do not know where Maoli is 

I know the summer surfaces 
of bodies and the tips of voices 
like stars out of their distances 
and where the music turns to noise 
I know the bargains in the news 
rules whole languages formulas 
wisdom that I will never use 
I do not know where Maoli is 

I know whatever one may lose 
somebody will be there who says 
what it will be all right to miss 
and what is verging on excess 
I know the shadows of the house 
routes that lead out to no traces 
many of his empty places 
I do not know where Maoli is 

You that see now with your own eyes 
all that there is as you suppose 
though I could stare through broken glass 
and show you where the morning goes 
though I could follow to their close 
the sparks of an exploding species 
and see where the world ends in ice 
I would not know where Maoli is

The second poem is a kind of answer to the question that faces us on those occasions when we find that the world has failed us: how should we respond? Merwin's answer to that question is indicative of the openhearted wisdom that suffuses all of his writing:

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on the stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
(from The Rain in the Trees, Knopf 1988)

64 x 37 (The Well Rising)

Stafford: 

The Well Rising

The well rising without sound,

the spring on a hillside,

the plowshare brimming through deep ground

everywhere in the field—

The sharp swallows in their swerve

flaring and hesitating

hunting for the final curve

coming closer and closer—

The swallow heart from wingbeat to wingbeat

counseling decision, decision:

thunderous examples. I place my feet

with care in such a world.

Process Reflection: 

I was thinking about this poem today after having written the acrostic poem about joy last night. William Stafford has always had a special place in my imaginary cathedral of literature. I've written about him on an number of occasions (for example here and here and here and here). The bridge between my poem and Stafford's is the notion of attention, the way the world rises and brims and swerves and flares whether we are watching or not, the way the sacred emerges from silence, the way attention is the gateway to appreciation. Of course, Stafford says it much better than I did. This is what he does, what W.S. Merwin does, what Mary Oliver does: they place their feet with care, and then they reflect on what they see and here. Here, for example, is Mary Oliver's poem "Praying":

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence

in which another voice may speak.

I used to work with a poet who dismissed Mary Oliver by saying that "she keeps writing the same poem over and over." There may be some slight element of truth in the allegation, but I don't agree that writing the same poem over again is necessarily a bad thing or an indication that a poet or an artist is out of ideas. There are some ideas that are worth returning to, even some ideas worthy of obsession. I do it myself often enough. Here's a poem I wrote almost twenty years ago which, it might be argued, is in essence the same poem I tried to write again last night:

Presence  

-  written after  reading Seamus Heaney’s “Field of Vision”
            in the parking lot of the Eastern Martial Arts Studio on August 5, 1996  

If you gaze in one direction long enough—
it doesn’t matter which, so long as you
do it patiently, reflectively—an inkling
of the mysterious begins to assert itself:
majesty of tree against sky, reaching
after itinerant sun with imperceptible in-
clination; painstaking progress of shadow
on clapboard; faintest touch of wind
stirring the golden elasticity of living
branch and bough. Enough, after all,
to do nothing more than breathe, bear
witness, be present to such clarity.

To round out this sampling, here's Merwin, extending the conversation we are having back through the centuries:

A Letter to Su Tung-p’o 

Almost a thousand years later
I am asking the same questions
you did the ones you kept finding
yourself returning to as though
nothing had changed except the tone
of their echo growing deeper
and what you knew of the coming
of age before you had grown old
I do not know any more now
than you did then about what you
were asking as I sit at night
above the hushed valley thinking
of you on your river that one
bright sheet of moonlight in the dream
of waterbirds and I hear
the silence after your questions
how old are the questions tonight