"In the old dark the late dark the still deep shadow

    that had travelled silently along itself all night

while the small stars of spring were yet to be seen and the few

    lamps burned by themselves..." – Merwin, "Ancestral Voices"

And the Few Lamps Burned by Themselves

    remember we used to hold the world up by lamps of imagination

another name for fires that rise up from the very touch

    of a hand if it is underneath listening to the flooded trees

rise up as a flame would from uncertain origins seeds

    set a hundred years ago before your own before memories

of such and such before the photographs of ancestors

    were lent to relatives and you held them in your hands

the river trees began to mount their productions and bends

    but today you hold the one that holds the eagle's nest

she had just flown in from over the city over the course

    sounds of metal and sadness to descend on these fierce

sticks plied together over two years so that when you paddle

    directly to its gray base you can only wonder if they feel

the flood and the timber wave by the pulse of the current

    that shriek that strove a moment ago on its arrival

that shriek that came from a time torn by unseen space

    that I could grow to be old and hear again what they did

 

"So gradual in those summers was the going

    of the age it seemed that the long days setting out

when the stars faded over the mountains were not

    leaving us even as the birds woke in full song ..." – Merwin, "The Speed of Light"

Even as the Birds Woke

We would have to go back a ways to cover our tracks

    of the dreams of moments that included the nothing

of every last thing of any trail or sky or pond or wintering

    bird that you might not recognize a mere pattern of dicibals

reaching away from the open limbs not as a chorus

    but of course more primitive a blot back there against

the wide open months of the treacherous season that takes

    and wills you away from yourself where the prairie

made more sense than the tasks of gain when the words

    we too spilled in under marshland canopy across

a boardwalk had the weight of tufts of dark flowers

    to give and receive eyes as rocks gleaming mouths

as organs still alive to the air and our own sounds crunching

    purposefully across thin sheens of ice where time always

sides with the long stretched torrent of life in winter months

    wake to your birds like hearts that can predict the sun