What Is To Be Done
“Director’s Notes” are excerpts from our monthly email newsletter, “Stories from the Garden.” Subscribe and see past issues here.
Dear Friends,
A few years ago, deep in the waist-high stacks of papers and books W.S. Merwin left behind in his study, we found a classic black and white composition notebook to which he had given the title “GARDENING IN THE DARK #1.” In the dated entries that fill its pages, William recapped his daily work in the garden, reminisced about the gardens he’d known in his youth, and recounted his travels as the 17th U.S. Poet Laureate from Peʻahi to Lacam and to Washington D.C., lamenting each departure from the garden that “I have come to in the last part of my life.”
I returned to “Gardening in the Dark” last week, drawn by the title alone. To parse William’s dense, at times indecipherable late script and to find a way in, I decided to skim the pages in search of an entry dated around the current time of year. Fifty-seven pages in I landed here:
January 25, 2011
A place in the garden, in what I think of as “my” or “our” garden, can assume a certain imaginary existence of its own, a question. Something is asking to be done. For me that usually means could, will be planted, should be planted there, but I do not yet know what it is…
I pause, sit in this question of what is to be done. I, too, feel uncomfortably suspended between the shoulds and the whats of my own time and responsibility. I return to William on his lanai before sunrise:
It is an hour of the day that I cherish, before the invasive species rush in…I think of one spot on the slope, makai (toward the sea) where a hole has been dug and left waiting for several weeks while I ponder what to plant there.
From here, for the better part of a page, William writes of the palms that might be planted in this hole, and inventories those he has put into the ground in recent weeks. He notes their native habitats, invokes the myths locked in their latin names, states their preference for shade or sun. And, expressing his eagerness to invite just the right palm—the Wettinia aequalis perhaps, “stilt rooted palms, fairly tall, most of them, from the Atlantic coast of Panama, to the Pacific coast of Ecuador”—to settle into a hole long kept open by his discomfort and distraction:
How I am impatient to plant the Wettinia in that spot and lure it to grow. But for days the demands of other things have prevented me from planting [it], and a day without planting a tree has come to be, for me, a day that is not altogether fulfilled (unless what prevents the planting is work on a poem.)
I return to the present darkness—and the light—that surrounds me, and look out at hundreds of thriving palms. Each of them once rooted itself in a hole dug by hand and held open by the preoccupations of the day, until the moment came for flourishing.
Sonnet
