Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, regular contributor at the Close Reeds

Podcast Network, filling in for David Kern. Today I'm going to read a poem called To a Leaf

Falling in Winter by W. S. Merwin.

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.

Merwin is an interesting poet. He writes in mostly blank verse, and he's known for his long lines

and his long poems, his narrative poems, his poems that tell stories.

But this one is a short poem, a short poem that's more of an image that compares leaves

to words. If you are able to look at the poem, to see the form of the poem. It is indeed one long sentence,

as you probably could tell by the way I read it, the rhythm of how I read it. And it looks,

if you look at it kind of like a leaves, zigzagging back and forth across the page.

It's a great example of a poem whose visual form contributes to the meaning unites with the words that it is saying

so that it becomes in many ways a meditation on change and meaning in the rhythm of language.

So I'm going to read it again, to a leaf falling in winter.

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.

...