W.S. Merwin - I Have Lost None Of It

I had read poems by W.S. Merwin before I actually heard him read in person, but seeing and hearing him at one of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festivals is what really got me to get his books and read the poems.

Merwin did an interview on the Bill Moyers Journal and talked about that Dodge appearance which Moyers recorded and turned into several books and videos, including Fooling With Words. 

Merwin’s book, The Shadow of Sirius, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and it is one of my favorites of his books. Maybe that's because much of it is the poetry of later life - loss, memory, time - and the backward and forward of what we see, feel, and remember. This childhood memory at the intersection of past and present is part of the poem “Still Morning."

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves

and I am a child before
there are words

arms are holding me up in a shadow

This book, which is named after the Dog Star, has a good number of poems about Merwin’s own dogs. His poem, “Dream of Koa Returning,” has Merwin walking with a dog and looking at the river and trees.

...and all at once you

were just behind me

lying watching me

as you did years ago 

and not stirring at all 

when I reached back 

slowly hoping to touch 

your long amber fur

and there we stayed without moving

 
In that interview, Moyers wondered: "Now, Sirius is the dog star, the most luminous star in the sky, twenty-five times more luminous than the sun. And yet, you write about its shadow. Something that no one has never seen. Something that's invisible to us. Help me to understand that." 

Merwin relplied, "That's the point. The shadow of Sirius is pure metaphor, pure imagination. But we live in it all the time. We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of-- as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there's the other side, which we never know. And that — it's the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It's the mystery. That's always with us, too. And it gives the depth and dimension to the rest of it."

 
In the poem "The Nomad Flute":

do you still hear me
does your air remember you 

or breath of morning 

night song morning song 

I have with me all 

that I do not know

I have lost none of it

 
Moyers asked, "What — how do you carry with you what you do not know?"

 
Merwin replies, "We always do that. I think that poetry and the most valuable things in our lives, and in fact the next sentence, your next question to me, Bill, come out of what we don't know. They don't come out of what we do know. They come out of what we do know, but what we do know doesn't make them. The real source of them is beyond that. It's something we don't know. They arise by themselves. And that's a process that we never understand.

Excerpt for "The Pinnacle"

Both of us understood

what a privilege it was

to be out for a walk

with each other

...she was beautiful

in her camel hair coat

that seemed like the autumn leaves

our walk was her idea

we liked listening to each other

her voice was soft and sure

and we went our favorite way

the first time just in case

it was the only time

even though it might be too far

we went all the way

up the Palisades to the place

we called the pinnacle

with its park at the cliff's edge

overlooking the river

it was already a secret

the pinnacle

as we were walking back

when the time was later

than we had realized

and in fact no one

seemed to know where we had been

even when she told them

no one had heard of the pinnacle

and then where did she go

from The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press)