I don’t know any longer whether I’m living or remembering. —Albert Camus

 

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One old man keeps humming the same few notes
of some song he thought he had forgotten
back in the days when as he knows there was
no word for life in the language 
and if they wanted to say eyes or heart
they would hold up a leaf and he remembers
the big tree where it rose from the dry ground
and the way the birds carried water in their voices
they were all the color of their fear of the dark
and as he sits there humming he remembers
some of the words they come back to him now
he smiles hearing them come and go


—W. S. Merwin
Parts of a Tune

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There are more like us. All over the world

there are confused people, who can’t remember

the name of their dog when they wake up, and people

who love God but can’t remember where

he was when they went to sleep. It’s

all right. The world cleanses itself this way.


—Robert Bly
from People Like Us 

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Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine
no roots are mine
that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest
and the forest will know it
we will both know it

and that birds vanish because of something
that I remember
flying through me as though I were a great wind
as the stones settle into the ground
the trees into themselves
staring as though I were a great wind
which is what I pray for

it is clear to me that I cannot return
but that some of us will meet once more
even here
like our own statues
and some of us still later without names
and some of us will burn with the speed
of endless departures
and be found and lost no more


—W.S. Merwin
The Carrier of Ladders

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