Greetings, writers—
A couple of weeks ago a friend told me about trying to read this W.S. Merwin poem out loud to his wife but finding himself, halfway through it, too chocked up to continue. We were sitting in a Northeast Portland beer garden that looked more like someone’s big, untended backyard than any official place of business. The day was sunny and beautiful, passing back and forth between chilly and warm the way Portland spring days seem to.
His kid was playing with other kids we knew in the spotty, unmown grass, and I was admitting that I, too, have a poem I can’t read aloud (actually there are a few, but there’s only one I ever talk about for some reason), and that this poem, like Merwin’s, is about time, and we agreed that the way to get practically any middle-aged person’s nose to run is to start talking about its relentless forward march.
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