I. Native Trees

Neither my father nor my mother knew

the names of the trees

where I was born

what is that

I asked and my

father and mother did not

hear they did not look where I pointed

surfaces of furniture held

the attention of their fingers

and across the room they could watch

walls they had forgotten

where there were no questions

no voices and no shade

Were there trees

where they were children

where I had not been

I asked

were there trees in those places

where my father and my mother were born

and in that time did

my father and my mother see them

and when they said yes it meant

they did not remember

What were they I asked what were they

but both my father and my mother

said they never knew

Text © 1988 by W.S. Merwin. Reproduced by permission of Georges Borchardt Inc. for the author. All rights reserved.

II. To the Insects

Elders

we have been here so short a time

and we pretend that we have invented memory

we have forgotten what it is like to be you

who do not remember us

we remember imagining that what survived us

would be like us

and would remember the world as it appears to us

but it will be your eyes that will fill with light

we kill you again and again

and we turn into you

eating the forests

eating the earth and the water

and dying of them

departing from ourselves

leaving you the morning

in its antiquity

Text © 1988 by W.S. Merwin. Reproduced by permission of Georges Borchardt Inc. for the author. All rights reserved.