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To the Blank Spaces

By W. S. Merwin b. 1927

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).

Biography

W.S. Merwin is a major American writer whose poetry, translations, and prose have won praise since W.H. Auden awarded his first book, A Mask for Janus (1952), the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Though that first book reflected the formalism of the period, Merwin eventually became known for an impersonal, open style that eschewed punctuation. Writing in the Guardian, Jay Parini described Merwin’s mature style as “his own kind of free . . .

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