Meditações - I imagine all the clocks have died in the night

In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year

 

It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young

Though I have long wondered what it would be like

To be me now

No older at all it seems from here

As far from myself as ever

 

Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing

I imagine all the clocks have died in the night

Now no one is looking I could choose my age

It would be younger I suppose so I am older

It is there at hand I could take it

Except for the things I think I would do differently

They keep coming between they are what I am

They have taught me little I did not know when I was young

 

There is nothing wrong with my age now probably

It is how I have come to it

Like a thing I kept putting off as I did my youth

 

There is nothing the matter with speech

Just because it lent itself

To my uses

 

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars

It is my emptiness among them

While they drift farther away in the invisible morning

 

W. S. Merwin, "In the Winter of my Thirty-Eighth Year", 1993