W.S. Merwin

“…Preserve my eyes, which are irreplaceable. Preserve my heart, veins, bones, Against the slow death building in them like hornets until the…

— W.S. Merwin

“all these years I have looked through your limbs to the river below and the roofs and the night and you were…

— W.S. Merwin

“I have no way of telling what I miss I am the only one who misses it”

— W.S. Merwin

“The thing that makes poetry different from all other arts [is that] you're using language, which is what you use for everything…

— W.S. Merwin

“A BIRTHDAY Something continues and I don't know what to call it though the language is full of suggestions in the way…

— W.S. Merwin

“October" I remember how I would say, “I will gather These pieces together, Any minute now I will make A knife out…

— W.S. Merwin

“...The silence of a place where there were once horses is a mountain and I have seen by lightning that ever mountain…

— W.S. Merwin

“In my youth I believed in somewhere else I put my faith in travel now I am becoming my own tree”

— W.S. Merwin

“How beautiful you must be to have been able to lead me this far with only the sound of your going away”

— W.S. Merwin

“I turned to the room and in the light from the street beheld one beautiful bare breast of a friend's friend gently…

— W.S. Merwin

“…Let all lights but yours be nothing to me. Let the memory of tongues not unnerve me so that I stumble or…

— W.S. Merwin

“Tell me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are”

— W.S. Merwin

“where will the meanings be when the words are forgotten will I see again where you are”

— W.S. Merwin

“...Yes, now the roads themselves are shattered As though they had fallen from a height, and the sky Is cracked like varnish.…

— W.S. Merwin

“Place" On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree what for not the fruit the tree…

— W.S. Merwin

“...The old bottles lay dreaming of new wine. I picked up my breast, which had gone out. By other lights I go…

— W.S. Merwin

“We begin to say something that cannot be said. When you see on the front page a woman in Iraq who's just…

— W.S. Merwin

“When I was me I remembered I could remember what was not there but may have been there once”

— W.S. Merwin

“with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings we are…

— W.S. Merwin

“What I remember I cannot tell though it is there in all that I say”

— W.S. Merwin

“Berryman" I will tell you what he told me in the years just after the war as we then called the second…

— W.S. Merwin

“As though it had always been forbidden to remember each of us grew up knowing nothing about the beginning”

— W.S. Merwin

“For a Coming Extinction Gray whale Now that we are sending you to The End That great god Tell him That we…

— W.S. Merwin

“he suggested I pray to the Muse get down on my knees and pray right there in the corner and he said…

— W.S. Merwin

“I try to hear you remembering that we are not separate to find you who cannot be lost or elsewhere or incomplete”

— W.S. Merwin