Echoing Light
When I was beginning to read I imagined
that bridges had something to do with birds
and with what seemed to be cages but I knew
that they were not cages it must have been autumn
with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires
and those orange places on fire in the pictures
and now indeed it is autumn the clear
days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing
over dry grass that yesterday was green
the empty corn standing trembling and a down
of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields
and everywhere the colors I cannot take
my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams
red it is the season of migrants
flying at night feeling the turning earth
beneath them and I woke in the city hearing
the call notes of the plover then again and
again before I slept and here far downriver
flocking together echoing close to the shore
the longest bridges have opened their slender wings
-W.S. Merwin
hmm. merwin is just one of the those deep image poets who keeps you in a space and won’t let you out. may we get palatial? no. let’s romp bridge, river, field, earth, night–sounds big right? but he keeps us contained somehow, here literally in his echo chamber. i think he got this from Bly, or maybe even Wright: start with a small unsuspecting little birdcage, end without limit.
nina, my students in Queens have been alerted of such P of the D chances to read and reply. they’re juniors at a baccalaureate school where I teach a two hour creative writing class once a week. the demographic abides, and now we get to them when they’re wee hatchlings of utterance. dangling modifiers looking for a sentence to call their own, one small initiation into the behavior modification that dangles rhapsodic among us. we tongues of poetry.