“For The Year” by W.S. Merwin

For James Baker Hall and Mary Ann Taylor Hall

If I did not know
I could not tell by
watching the blue sky
with not a cloud
moving across it
in the still morning
above the flying
songs of the thrushes

that in these unseen
hours of clear daylight
one more year even
now is leaving us
one more year one more
decade wherever
it is that they go
once they have been here

and we waited up
for them I stood in
a friend’s house high on
a hill looking out
over the city
to the sea ten years
ago and my ears
rang with the midnight

fireworks rising from 
the lit streets into
that time with its stars
my hair was still dark
I did not know you
and in the morning
both the puppies barked
and the tiles had come

for the new roof we
are living under
it is already
a year now since we 
sat here with friends by
candlelight talking
of childhoods risen
at last from hiding

until we saw that
the candles had burned
past the moment we 
had been waiting for
and already it
had slipped through our words
and hands and was gone
and the year was new

without our having
seen how it happened
bringing with it far
from our sight this whole
day wherever it
is going now as 
we watch it together
here in the morning