Matthew Zapruder - Poem for Merwin

for a long time you planted one every day
and now the garden is a clock on forest time

 

forest time where we were happy
for a few translucent hours moving
into the ghost houses
no longer there

 

and the shade houses
that are
their myth of air

 

and the places where people used to gather
by the stream that is now a dry bed
to eat and sing
we cannot almost hear them

 

then out along the narrow paths
over stones I kept forgetting
like years you had placed

 

and the dead clock face painters
covered in radiu...