Variation on a Theme

W. S. Merwin - 1927-2019

Thank you my life long afternoon
late in this spring that has no age
my window above the river
for the woman you led me to
when it was time at last the words
coming to me out of mid-air
that carried me through the clear day
and come even now to find me
for old friends and echoes of them
those mistakes only I could make
homesickness that guides the plovers
from somewhere they had loved before
they knew they loved it to somewhere
they had loved before they saw it
thank you good body hand and eye
and the places and moments known
only to me revisiting
once more complete just as they are
and the morning stars I have seen
and the dogs who are guiding me

My friends without shields walk on the target It is late the windows are breaking My friends without shoes leave What they love Grief moves among them as a fire among Its bells My friends without clocks turn On the dial they turn They part My friends with names like gloves set out Bare handed as they have lived And nobody knows them It is they that lay the wreaths at the milestones it is their Cups that are found at the wells And are then chained up My friends without feet sit by the wall Nodding to the lame orchestra Brotherhood it says on the decorations My friend without eyes sits in the rain smiling With a nest of salt in his hand My friends without fathers or houses hear Doors opening in the darkness Whose halls announce Behold the smoke has come home My friends and I have in common The present a wax bell in a wax belfry This message telling of Metals this Hunger for the sake of hunger this owl in the heart And these hands one For asking one for applause My friends with nothing leave it behind In a box My friends without keys go out from the jails it is night They take the same road they miss Each other they invent the same banner in the dark They ask their way only of sentries too proud to breathe At dawn the stars on their flag will vanish The water will turn up their footprints and the day will rise Like a monument to my Friends the forgotten

If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father had broken a leg parachuting into Provence to join the resistance in the final stage of the war and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north out of Italy and if the friend who was with him as he was dying had not had an elder brother who also died young quite differently in peacetime leaving two children one of them with bad health who had been kept out of school for a whole year by an illness and if I had written anything else at the top of the examination form where it said college of your choice or if the questions that day had been put differently and if a young woman in Kittanning had not taught my father to drive at the age of twenty so that he got the job with the pastor of the big church in Pittsburgh where my mother was working and if my mother had not lost both parents when she was a child so that she had to go to her grandmother’s in Pittsburgh I would not have found myself on an iron cot with my head by the fireplace of a stone farmhouse that had stood empty since some time before I was born I would not have travelled so far to lie shivering with fever though I was wrapped in everything in the house nor have watched the unctuous doctor hold up his needle at the window in the rain light of October I would not have seen through the cracked pane the darkening valley with its river sliding past the amber mountains nor have wakened hearing plums fall in the small hour thinking I knew where I was as I heard them fall

Poems

Variation on a Theme

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My Friends

One of the Lives

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Variation on a Theme

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