COMPLETION
Seen from afterward the time appears to have been
all of a piece which of course it was but how seldom
it seemed that way when it was still happening and was
the air through which I saw it as I went on thinking
of somewhere else in some other time whether gone
or never to arrive and so it was divided
however long I was living it and I was where
it kept coming together and where it kept moving apart
while home was a knowledge that did not suit every occasion
but remained familiar and foreign as the untitled days
and what I knew better than to expect followed me
into the garden and I would stand with friends among
the summer oaks and be a city in a different
age and the dread news arrived on the morning when the plum trees
opened into silent flower and I could not let go
of what I longed to be gone from and it would be that way
without end I thought unfinished and divided
by nature and then a voice would call from the field
in the evening or the fox would bark in the cold night
and that instant with each of its stars just where it was
in its unreturning course would appear even then
entire and itself the way it all looks from afterward
— W.S. Merwin, from his book The Vixen. Copyright © 1996 by W. S. Merwin. Included inMigration: New & Selected Poems, winner of the National Book Award. Used by permission of the publishers, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
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Featured photo by Bill Devlin used under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. The original image can be found here.
