WS.MERWIN
The two-legged, some
to
the left, some to the right, put on their
belts, garters, slacks, and sandals.
And they move on their stilts, longing after a forest home, after
low tunnels, after 3n assigned return to It.
121
These sections can represent Milosz's work, of course, in only a tiny and
fractional way, but I can think of many other poems, hundreds perhaps, that
I would have liked to choose to stand for what he has given
to
us, and it
strikes me that so partial and inadequate a representation is inadequate in
much the same way as these words of mine are to convey the gratitude and
regard that I have fel t for Czeslaw as a man and as a poet for four decades.
My indebtedness to him is an exemplar of what can be, what i possible.
The poetry, the imaginative thought, the example of the insistent union of
the imagination, of language, and of conscience. We share many sympathies,
some of the same feeling about rivers, and many convictions, such as the one
that Czeslaw constantly attributes
to
Simone Weil-that attention itself is
the core of the secret, the endJess begirming.
When Czeslaw and Carol came much more recently to visit us on
Maui, he was assembling his anthology of luminous things. A few poems
of mine found their way into that lovely book, including a poem called
"For the Anniversary of my Death." That poem was written shortly before
Czeslaw came to visi t me in France, and I'm not going to read that one,
but one written at about the same time called "Avoiding News by the
River." It was the time of the Vietnam War, of the nuclear menace and the
human use of poisons for agriculture and killing vegetation and other
forms of life, the pollution of all the elements around us except fire, and
the accelerating destruction of species and the biosphere, subjects that were
barely being considered at that time. It filled me with a pessintism that
made the act of writing something that I resorted to only when it became
very insistent to me. The poems I wrote then only when they pushed
themselves upon me, s0111etimes in the middle of the night. Sometimes I
would get up and walk at night and those of you who have done this in
the country, away from human habitation, know that, as the phrase is, you
find your way, not by seeing but by the other senses. Dante touched on it
in the "Terrace of Anger" in the
P[{~\?aforio,
this seeing that is not seeing.
If one believes, as I do, that the phenomenal world itself is a metaphor, the
eye taken like this becomes even more remarkable. Sometimes I would
walk on the upland at night and sometimes I would walk down by the
river, and this poem is about the morning coming down to the river just
as the first light comes in, at that historic moment. "Avoiding News by the
River."
I
Reads poem.
I
