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

Today's poem is by W.S. Merwin, an American poet who is still living. He's 91 years old.

He has won two Pulitzer Prizes in 1971 and 2009. He won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2005. He has won the

Penn Translation Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and he has been the

United States Poet Laureate. Merwin is absolutely one of the preeminent modern American poets.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is called Fox Sleep. It's from the

vixen, which was published in 1996, a collection published in 1996. This poem actually has

several parts to it, I think six parts to it, maybe, seven, something like that. I'm going to read

the first section of that poem. This is how it goes. On a road through the mountains with a friend

many years ago, I came to a curve on a slope where a clear stream flowed down, flashing across

dark rocks through its own echoes that could neither be caught nor forgotten. It was the turning

of autumn, and already the mornings were cold,

with ragged clouds in the hollows long after sunrise. But the pasture sagging like a roof,

the glassy water and flickering yellow leaves, and the few poplars and knotted plum trees

were held up in a handful of sunlight that made the slates on the silent mill by the stream

glisten white above their ruin. And a few relics of the life before had been arranged in front

of the open millhouse, to wait, pale in the daylight, out on the open mountain, after whatever

they had been made for was over. The dew was drying on them, and there were few who took that road

who might buy one of them and take it away somewhere, to be unusual, to be the only one,

to become unknown. A wooden bed stood there on rocks, a cradle the color of dust, a cracked

oil jar, iron pots, wooden wheels, iron wheels, stone wheels, the tall box of a clock,

and among them a ring of white stone the size of an embrace set into another of the same size,

...