Wandering Merwin's forest of poems

I woke to the news that W.S. Merwin was dead and I sat right down and cried. Never knew the man, of course, except through the documentary Even Though the Whole World is Burning. And his poetry. Poetry does not provide direct access to the poet, but I have often felt that Merwin's poetry knows me and knows me well.

I don't know which of his poems I love best, but this morning I reached for the ones that speak to deep parts of my soul. The documentary Even Though the Whole World is Burning takes its title from the last line of "Rain Light," a poem I have taught to bright fresh college students even though it assumes some familiarity with loss, opening with the mother comforting her son over her impending absence. Loss is evoked also in "For the Anniversary of My Death," in which the poet imagines a time when, he writes, "I will no longer / Find myself in life as in a strange garment / Surprised at the earth." Today many will return to that poem and hail its prescience--and in fact the Merwin Conservancy has posted the poem on its home page alongside the announcement of his death.

This morning I've been thinking about the Merwin Conservancy, the group formed to protect Merwin's legacy--not just his poems but the nature preserve that grew out of his love for a spot of ruined land on Maui, the former pineapple plantation he transformed into a verdant refuge for tropical trees, over 700 species, many rare or endangered, all of which he planted and watered by hand. Even Though the Whole World is Burning suggests that Merwin saw tending to trees and writing poems as two halves of the same work, so it's no surprise that he left behind so many trees in his poems. "Place" begins thus: "On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree," not for its fruit but so that it can stand and grow and enrich the natural world and live on long after the gardener is gone.

Also running through Merwin's forest of poetry is a memorable fox, the vixen that gave the title to one of his finest poems. The vixen is addressed as 

Comet of stillness princess of what is over
        high note held without trembling without voice without sound
aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets
        of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences
never caught with words warden of where the river went...

And the lines lope on in a mesmerizing rhythm that echoes the vixen's fluid movement until vixen and poem dissolve into "the silence after the animals."

I tried once to memorize "The Vixen" and enjoyed rolling those long, loose lines around in my mouth, but something interrupted, no doubt some mundane duty "more important than poetry," and I lost track, lost focus, lost the vixen in the woods. But I did succeed in memorizing another Merwin poem, "Thanks," which begins with a command to "Listen." But what will we hear? In this case, people beset by the demands of daily life, in despair over violence and injustice and death, who nevertheless feel the need to express gratitude:

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

This morning when I heard news of the dead (even though I didn't know him) I wanted to say thank you. So here I sit, tears in my eyes, thinking about W.S. Merwin and wanting to plant a tree and recite a poem and chase a vixen but I can't find the words, but fortunately he's provided them:

with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is