Columns

Separation

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.

—W. S. Merwin, b. 1927 

Three lines—one homely, familiar image—the sharp point of a needle piercing my being, dragging the thread of a loved one’s absence, stitching the “color” of this loss through me and into “everything I do.” 

Exactly. Using abstract, even vague terms like “absence” and “separation,” Merwin opens us to the widest possible range of loss, great or small, brief or permanent. In sixteen words, clear to any reader, he says more than hundreds of pages can tell about the loneliness, loss, and grief—of brief or long-term physical or psychic distance—or of the ultimate separation: death. 

Not that we learn something new, but that we are reminded of something that, at a deeper level, we already know. 

And, somehow, we are profoundly, paradoxically, comforted. He has stitched our losses into a color, a texture added to us. 

That’s why we need poets. 

(Send the Berkley Daily Planet a page from your own Commonplace Book)