The Furrow

Apropos of my feelings about age, and all the metaphorical seeds that are quietly gestating, on my teeth and elsewhere, and since I think I have a case of Springtime-itis, I though I'd share this poem with y'all:

The Furrow

by W.S. Merwin

from "The Vixen"

Did I think it would abide as it was forever


all that time ago the turned earth in the old garden


where I stood in spring remembering spring in another place


that had ceased to exist and the dug roots kept giving

up
their black tokens their coins and bone buttons and shoe nails


made by hands and bits of plates as the thin clouds


of that season slipped past gray branches on which the early


white petals were catching their light and I thought I

knew
something of age then my own age which had conveyed me


to there and the ages of the trees and the walls and houses


from before my coming and the age of the new seeds as I


set each one in the ground to begin to remember


what to become and the order in which to return


and even the other age into which I was passing


all the time while I was thinking of something different