When You Go Away by W. S. Merwin
When you go away the wind clicks around to the north The painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls Showing the black walls The clock goes back to striking the same hour That has no place in the years
And at night wrapped in the bed of ashes In one breath I wake It is the time when the beards of the dead get their growth I remember that I am falling That I am the reason And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy
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