301“between the earth and silence”
W. S. Merwin’s Motion of Mind
is words convey a sense that he is not
standing outside the world he is portraying but is an intimately and endlessly
concerned part of it, as it in turn is a part of the ceaselessly attentive motion of
his own mind.”
This could speak for John Clare the peasant poet, Thoreau, and many others.
Instead it ’s W. S. Merwin (b. 1927) in “The Blind Seer of Ambon,” saluting a
seventeenth-century German naturalist who came to Ambon, one of the South
Pacific Spice Islands, and stayed for fifty years. Rumphius wrote about plants and
animals but not with technical possessiveness, classifying so as “to occupy a com-
manding position in a pattern of existence.” Instead he was “a wondering presence,”
even humorous, as with hermit crabs carrying off some “beautiful shells” he ’d laid
out to bleach. “These little quarrelsome creatures have caused me much grief.”
Rumphius lost his wife and daughter to earthquake, his flower drawings to
fire, manuscripts to the sea, and finally his sight.
I take a shell in my hand
new to itself and to me
I feel the thinness the warmth and the cold
I listen to the water
which is the story welling up
I remember the colors and their lives
everything takes me by surprise
it is all awake in the darkness“
H