While we're on summer hiatus, recharging our batteries and coming up with new story ideas, we want to make sure that you have plenty to read. That's why we'll be posting excerpts every day from New Jersey books and authors. We'll be back, rested and ready, after Labor Day. Meanwhile . . .
“I think of old age as being a time like the others,” the 86-year-old W.S. Merwin recently told the Associated Press. “It has revelations of its own that you can’t come to any other way.” The Pulitzer-prize winning poet’s most recent collection, “The Moon Before Morning,” is brimming with such revelations. A study of age, memory, and the natural world, the collection reflects upon a life lived in many places, from New York City where he was born to New Jersey and Scranton where he was raised, to Hawaii, where he lives today.
CANCELLATION
The first school I went to
was torn down a year later
but I still know
the way to it
down the avenue and across
and I carry with me the stories
weightless as shadows
of its cold walls
like crumpled tunnels
roughcast to look real
their silent faces
looking past me
I was smaller than anyone else
too young for the games they were playing
I stood watching until the bell rang
at the end of recess
and the echoes thundered
on the iron stairs
of the building named for
a president whose face
was on a black postage stamp
the color of the stones outside
because he had died in office
the next year we were led
to a new redbrick school
named for the inventor of lightbulbs
FERRIES
They have not gone anywhere for some time now
out of the port where the snow is falling
and it goes on falling slowly as though
it were sliding down glass in silence
and keeps falling steadily through the years
so that I cannot read all the letters
now of the names in black on the panels
up on the top decks in front of the paired
wheelhouses one forward one aft
with the wheels still visible inside them
Weehawken Bergen Yonkers a few
remain partly legible through the snow
the rest are anonymous whited out
and spellbound bundled against each other
filling the whole cove on Staten Island
cataracts cancelling the tiered windows
which of them brought me across the river
from the hospital where I had been born
if they brought me by boat and who watched it come in
saw the ramps go down and I heard for the first time
its chains ring as the capstans turned
and in later days we would walk aboard or ashore
and the living deck under us was an old friend
ready to take us where we meant to go
or to bring us home again and again
it would swing us out onto the water
under the gulls’ cries on the real river
and which of those hulls carried me home again
when the time came and the day had gone by
it rang its bells then and blew its whistle
and the black greased pilings of the jetties
fell aside to show the churning water
as we set out from their heavy embrace
I thought the ferries then were practicing
something they had always known how to do
I believed they knew where they were going