POEM
To the Blank Spaces
For longer than by now I can believe
I assumed that you had nothing to do
with each other I thought you had arrived
whenever that had been
more solitary than single snowflakes
with no acquaintance or understanding
running among you guiding your footsteps
somewhere ahead of me
in your own time oh white lakes on the maps
that I copied and gaps on the paper
for the names that were to appear in them
sometimes a doorway or
window sometimes an eye sometimes waking
without knowing the place in the whole night
I might have guessed from the order in which
you turned up before me
and from the way I kept looking at you
as though I recognized something in you
that you were all words out of one language
tracks of the same creature
Source: Poetry (October 2002).
This poem originally appeared in the October 2002 issue of Poetry.
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W.S. Merwin is a major American writer whose poetry, translations, and prose have won praise since . . . MORE »
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