Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
__________
“Separation” by W. S. Merwin. Read it in his excellent Migration: New & Selected Poems.
“Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.” – W. S. Merwin
I took the photograph on a rain-soaked afternoon in a tiny hotel in Grindelwald, Switzerland. A cool summer shower was pelting the windowpane as the sky grayed and bruised with purple clouds.
It’s a picture I remember setting up and shooting (a process that involved clicking the TV to the weirdest channel available); yet I had forgotten about the image itself. Like a lot of photographs, it came from utter boredom — the process of studying a mundane space and trying to make something interesting out of it.
john said:
Like the photograph but dislike the poem. Sometimes in poetry one has to guard against slipping from nuanced metaphor into bad pun. To me, Merwin slipped.
jrbenjamin said:
Now that you say it…
I agree about the metaphor being heavy handed, but I like the simplicity of the poem. It somehow captures that feeling of resignation towards an absence without doing too much. But, yeah, the metaphor does slip a bit.