Welcome back to the Daily Pole, I'm here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today is December 19th, 2019. The poem that I'm going to read to you today is by William Stanley

Merwin, W.S. Merwin, an American poet who was born in 1927 and died in March of this year. He added March 15th. He wrote

many books of poetry and prose and also translation. He was the 1971 and the 2009 winner of the

Pulitzer Prize and the 2005 winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. And in 2010, he was named the 17th United States Poet Laureate.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called To a Leaf Falling in Winter.

This is how it goes.

At sundown, when a day's words have gathered at the feet of the trees lining up in silence

to enter the long corridors of the roots into which they pass one by one thinking that

they remember the place as they feel themselves climbing away from their only sound while

they are being forgotten by their bright circumstances.

They rise through all of the rings, listening again afterward, as they listened once,

and they came to where the leaves used to live during their lives, but have gone now,

and they too take the next step beyond the reach of meaning.

So as is customary with quite a bit of Merwin's poetry, there is next to no punctuation in this poem.

The lines meander and twist about themselves.

They interact in a sort of puzzle-like fashion, almost like a weaving.

If you're not careful, you don't know when a new thought is going to begin,

when a new idea or a new image is going to separate itself from another image, when it's going to be sort of taking you somewhere

new. And in that way, it's sort of like a root system, which is, of course, what this poem is

referencing. There's this idea of the long corridors of the roots. And it's overly simplistic,

I suppose, to put it this way. But one of the reasons that I like

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