WS Merwin: It Is March

The great poet and translator WS Merwin (1927 - 2019) died last night. That explains why I was reading a review-essay about Merwin at the New York Review of Books this morning. It was a piece from a couple years ago, but they just put it up without explanation. That's fine. Like all of us he has always been here and always been gone. But that doesn't explain why, a couple weeks ago, the LitHub website posted a long piece, which I read, by his longtime friend Michael Wiegers meditating on Merwin's ancient stone farmhouse (above) in the Pyrenees region of France, which he owned and lived in at least part time for most of the last 70 years. It was probably the last major piece about Merwin while he was still alive. Call it a prophetic obit. Merwin was concerned with loss -- of language, of culture, of the natural world not so mediated by man, and I think human life, too, though perhaps he wasn't sentimental about it.

Here's a passage from Merwin that Wiegers includes in his essay:

what is it
they say can turn even this into wisdom
and what is wisdom if it is not
now
in the loss that has not left this place

oh if we knew
if we knew what we needed if we knew
the stars would look to us to guide them

Here's a poem I selected from his section at the Poetry Foundation website. It's called, "It Is March," which of course it is.

It is March and black dust falls out of the books
Soon I will be gone
The tall spirit who lodged here has
Left already
On the avenues the colorless thread lies under
Old prices

When you look back there is always the past
Even when it has vanished
But when you look forward
With your dirty knuckles and the wingless
Bird on your shoulder
What can you write

The bitterness is still rising in the old mines
The fist is coming out of the egg
The thermometers out of the mouth of the corpses

At a certain height
The tales of the kites for a moment are
Covered with footsteps

Whatever I have to do has not yet begun

September 1964