W.S. Merwin Quotes

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

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

Separation

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

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

I offer you what I have my
Poverty

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

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