W.S. Merwin Quotes

My words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.

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So this is what I am

Pondering his eyes that could not
Conceive that I was a creature to run from

I who have always believed too much in words

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Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

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part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

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I offer you what I have my
Poverty

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Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

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Utterance

Sitting over words
Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
Not far
Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
The echo of everything that has ever
Been spoken
Still spinning its one syllable
Between the earth and silence

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