In the spring of 1991, I came from western Massachusetts to northern Rhode Island to visit my parents for a specific reason—to look at The New Yorker and Natural History magazines they subscribed to. In June, I intended to begin a creative writing support group at my home, and I was gathering materials. These magazines might have the kind of quotes I was looking for to use as writing prompts.
Earlier that year, in February, Pat Schneider, the founder of Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA), had handed me a note at the end of her weekly AWA writing workshop. I decided to wait until I got home to read it. In the early morning hours, I was thrilled when I did. She thought I would be a good leader of a writers’ support group.
In my parents’ living room, I sat on the thick, Aegean-blue carpet with a big stack of magazines beside me, and thumbed through pages, stopping to tear out those of poetry or photos that offered possibilities. Among my collected pages was one with a four-line poem by W.S. Merwin, in which there was a line of bird images that would stay clear in my mind for the next twenty-eight years, although that was all that would remain clear. Through the years, I repeatedly forgot and then remembered Merwin’s name, and then forget it again, until for the past two years my memory would not recover it at all. Even now, I have no explanation for the sadness I felt about that, a sadness that gradually turned into determination. I began searching websites, beginning with The New Yorker. Periodically I repeated the alphabet, but other than my pausing each time at the Ws, that memory trick didn’t work.
Then one serendipitous day, I chanced upon his name. As I opened a link to his poetry, I felt the delighted happiness of a lost part of my life having come home. From reading several of his poems, I learned that I could not clearly and fully understand all of his lines, but I could feel many of them, and that was more than enough.
I surmise that I discovered W.S. Merwin’s name after Copper Canyon Press, his publisher, announced his passing away at ninety-one on March 15, 2019 at his home near Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii.* Finding the press website, I discovered an opportunity to post “well wishes and thoughts” and wrote of the importance still of this line as it was when I first read it:
“Black birds rowing across bright spaces . . .”**
I found Merwin’s “Rain Travel.” that took me back to times I had watched through blurred glass, rain that filled my ears, not with ‘roaring,’ but with pounding. The poem begins with Merwin waking before daybreak. He remembers that today he is going alone on a journey. Someone still sleeps beside him. Writing in the first person, he hears . . .
drops falling one by one into
the sightless leaves and I
do not know when they began but
all at once there is no sound but rain
and the stream below us roaring
away into the rushing darkness.***
My realization is, “That which is supposed to happen, in time, does happen.”
* W.S. Merwin (1927 – 2019) I especially appreciated a line of his that I recently read on his publisher’s website: “Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.” You may read a brief history of the poet at the Copper Canyon Press website: www.coppercanyonpress.org/pages/browse/author.asp?ag={5D7D8EE9-7AC6-473F-91DA-
F8CCDE1A1B98}
** The New Yorker (New York: Condé Nast Publications Inc., c. 1991).
*** W.S. Merwin, “Rain Travel,” Garden Time (Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2016). To read the poem in its entirety, visit at:
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2004%252F04%252F06.html