W.S. MerwinTo a Friend Travelling
The harsh cry of a partridge echoes along the valley through the misty rain two months after you left you would recognize it though you no longer noticed the sound except in your dreams once again I do not know where you may be where to think of you how to send you anything whether you need it or not you may be far away by now yet I keep hearing your footsteps all day in the house in another room this is like one of those letters written on a mountain in China more than a thousand years ago by someone staring at the miles of white clouds after a friend's departure there were so many of those unsigned and never sent as far as we know
To the StoryEven now I suppose you are hiding in the daylight the way you always do granting only the most cursory kind of attention or none at all like a self off in some other country other time other life as though you knew better than the moment while the moment is quietly there unproclaimed with its occasions its events signaling from their distances you fail to see as it passes before you what you will never manage to remember later the missing key to the present and its unrepeated life and so you will have to make it up as plausibly as you can out of odds and ends of what someone wrote down or you may remember if memory serves you or you will conjure from those same elements and selves summoned out of some other country other time other life some other tale that never happened to be the truth of what could not be told as it lived and breathed and eluded our attention as though in itself it had no story
W. S. Merwin is the author of more than fifteen books of poetry and twenty volumes of translations. His many honors include the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He lives and works in Hawaii.
