For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then
there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song
"The New Song" by W.S. Merwin, from The Moon Before Morning. © Copper Canyon Press, 2014.
And so we say adieu to April and to poetry focus.
This was my fave Knopf poem this month:
ReplyDeleteWitness
An ordinary evening in Wisconsin
seen from a Greyhound bus - mute aisles
of merchandise the sole inhabitants
of the half-darkened Five and Ten,
the tables of the single lit café awash
with unarticulated pathos, the surface membrane
of the inadvertently transparent instant
when no one is looking: outside town
the barns, their red gone dark with sundown,
withhold the shudder of a warped terrain -
the castle rocks above, tree-clogged ravines
already submarine with nightfall, flocks
(like dark sheep) of toehold junipers,
the lucent arms of birches : purity
without a mirror, other than a mind bound
elsewhere, to tell how it looks.
Sigh.
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