time travel & W. S. Merwin

[image error]In the spirit of the syllabic breakthrough I mentioned last week in the poem that inspired the title for my latest collection, Until We Are Level Again (Mongrel Empire Press), I share “A Letter to Su T’ung Po” by W. S. Merwin. Merwin has been an inspiration for over a decade. His lyric insight and meditative verve worked through in syllabics made me ambitious and had me counting mine own syllables regularly. The poem below is a fine example of how sometimes the words fall into place how we need them.

Revising from old journals earlier this week, I discovered the following note I made underneath where I had written out Merwin’s poem by hand. I share it now as a way to mingle with the time travel implied in the title and content of the poem:

I heard Merwin read this poem a week after filing for divorce from my first marriage. Ani was with me , both of us full of questions. This poem is a river in itself. The last line crosses centuries in a gasp, like one stepping away from the face of a river.

A Letter to Su T’ung Po – W. S. Merwin 

Almost a thousand years later

I am asking the same questions

you did the ones you kept finding

yourself returning to as though

nothing had changed except the tone

of their echo growing deeper

and what you knew of the coming

of age before you had grown old

I do not know any more now

than you did then about what you

were asking as I sit at night

above the hushed valley thinking

of you on your river that one

bright sheet of moonlight in the dream

of the water birds and I hear

the silence after your questions

how old are the questions tonight

from The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)