February 28
February 28, 2008
Rain Light
W. S. Merwin
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning
My father-in-law died a year ago today. My son turns 11 months old today. I was born 35 years ago yesterday. My father died 75 years- to the day– after he was born.
The proximity of these dates and events makes me want to force some meaning out of them. What does it mean that my father was born on July 14, and that he died on July 14? What does it mean that my father and father-in-law were born in 1928, that they both served in the Navy during the Korean War? What does it mean that my father-in-law died one month — to the day– before his grandson was born? What does it mean that my father’s birthday was 7-14-28, that my father-in-law’s birthday was 3-14-28, and that my son’d birthday is 3-28-07?
The questions remind me of another poem by Mark Strand:
Precious Little
If blindness is blind to itself
Then vision will come.
You open the door that was your shiled,
And walk out into the coils of wind
And blurred tattoos of light that mar the ground.
The day feels cold on your skin.
“Out of my way,” you say to whatever is waiting, “Out of my way.”
In a trice the purple thunder draws back, the tulip drops
Its petals, the path is clear.
You head west over the Great
Divide and down through canyons into an endless valley.
The air is pure, the houses vacant.
Off in the distance the wind– all ice and feeling–
Invents a tree and a harp, and begins to play.
What could be better– long phrases of air stirring the leaves,
The leaves turning? But listen again. Is it really the wind,
Or is it the sound of someboy running
One step ahead of the dark?
And if it is, and nothing turns out
As you thought, then what is the difference
Between blindness lost and blindness regained?
