Five Ways

To the Blank Spaces (W. S. Merwin)

For longer than by now I can believe
I assumed that you had nothing to do
with each other I thought you had arrived

whenever that had been

more solitary than single snowflakes
with no acquaintance or understanding
running among you guiding your footsteps

somewhere ahead of me

in your own time oh white lakes on the maps
that I copied and gaps on the paper
for the names that were to appear in them

sometimes a doorway or

window sometimes an eye sometimes waking
without knowing the place in the whole night
I might have guessed from the order in which

you turned up before me

and from the way I kept looking at you
as though I recognized something in you
that you were all words out of one language

tracks of the same creature