without a word

I couldn't decide which W. S. Merwin poem to post, so here are two, one for today and one to count for April 17. They're variations on a theme (it's a little weird to be back in Texas where it very much is already summer), and I really enjoy the way Merwin just doesn't use punctuation at all.

Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for the first time
to find themselves among fallen petals
cradling their day's colors in the day's shadows
of the garden beside the old house
after a cold spring with no rain
not a sound comes from the empty village
as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this

—W. S. Merwin (1927-2019), "Black Cherries," from Garden Time, 2016.

*

The first hay is in and all at once
in the silent evening summer has come
knowing the place wholly the green skin
of its hidden slopes where the shadows will
never reach so far again and a few
gray hairs motionless high in the late
sunlight tell of rain before morning
and of finding the daybreak under green
water with no shadows but all still the same
still known still the known faces of summer
faces of water turning into the themselves
changing without a word into the themselves

—W. S. Merwin (1927-2019), "After the Spring," published in Poetry (June 1992).