Writing+as+a+Reader

//Maui resident W.S. Merwin has just been named United States Poet Laureate. He is a writer with a luminous, highly individualistic style who has written a large number of "teachable" poems. If you prefer, chose a paragraph of similar length from some other writer whose work you admire.//

//Assignment: Study one of these poems and then write briefly about something that this writer has done that interests or pleases you. Then write a passage of roughly 50-100 words in which you try to do something like that.//

Place
On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree

what for not for the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit is not the one that I planted

I want the tree that stands in the earth for the first time

with the sun already going down

and the water touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead and the clouds passing

one by one over its leaves

Snow
Comes the dust falling in the air comes in the afternoon the sunbeam comes through the sound of friends comes the shadow through the door comes the unturned page come the name comes the footstep comes to each wall the portrait comes the white hair

comes with the flowers opening comes as the hands touch and stay comes with late fortune and late seed comes with the hole of music comes with the light of mountains comes at the hours of clouds comes the white hair

comes the sudden widening of the river comes as the birds disappear in the air comes while we talk together comes as we listen to each other comes as we are lying together comes while we sleep comes the white hair


 * The Speed of Light**

So gradual in those summers was the going of the age it seemed that the long days setting out when the stars faded over the mountains were not leaving us even as the birds woke in full song and the dew glittered in the webs it appeared then that the clear morning opening into the sky was something of ours to have and keep and that the brightness we could not touch and the air we could not hold had come to be there all the time for us and would never be gone and that the axle we did not hear was not turning when the ancient car coughed in the roofer's barn and rolled out echoing first thing into the lane and the only tractor in the village rumbled and went into its rusty mutterings before heading out of its lean-to into the cow pats and the shadow of the lime tree we did not see that the swallows flashing and the sparks of their cries were fast in the spokes of the hollow wheel that was turning and turning us taking us all away as one with the tires of the baker's van where the wheels of bread were stacked like days in calendars coming and going all at once we did not hear the rim of the hour in whatever we were saying or touching all day we thought it was there and would stay it was only as the afternoon lengthened on its dial and the shadows reached out farther and farther from everything that we began to listen for what might be escaping us and we heard high voices ringing the village at sundown calling their animals home and then the bats after dark and the silence on its road