Life &Poetry Entropy | 29 May 2009
Any Time
W.S.Merwin deeply connects life with the vivid movement and activity of his poetry, which seem to flow up from an underground river that lies beneath mere speech, as though written in some pre-verbal language of which all later languages have proved to be a mere translation. Here’s a 1970s poem called “The Dreamers”:
A man with his eyes shut swam upward
through dark water and came to air
it was the horizon
he felt his way along it and it opened
and let the sun out…
Any Time
How long ago the day is
when at last I look at it
with the time it has taken
to be there still in it
now in the transparent light
with the flight in the voices
the beginning in the leaves
everything I remember
and before it before me
present at the speed of light
in the distance that I am
who keep reaching out to it
seeing all the time faster
where it has never stirred from
before there is anything
the darkness thinking the light
on 29 May 2009 at 12:50 pm 1.michele roohani said …
Scary, dark stuff my friend…Makes me anxious…
on 29 May 2009 at 4:50 pm 2.Magda said …
Brilliant… Thank you!
on 31 May 2009 at 7:48 am 3.joywax said …
Yes. This speaks God, Being, Hope. It is every day and all the days. It progresses to Einstein to now, from the illusive start–before the start. Have you read Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist ?
This is, I hope, another example of art presaging science. When a physicist or cosmologist understands this poem and finds the math for it, we’ll know and be fully… light (and dark ?).