“They have sewn themselves into our clothes / and into the seams of our sleep. / They are the small, patient teeth / of the end.”
“That’s the key,” Elias said. “There’s only one place to enter it. A forgotten subdomain of a university server in New Mexico. The last digital caretaker is a retired librarian named Mavis. She’s 84. She only responds to handwritten emails.” The Lice- Poems By W.S. Merwin Download Pdf
Zoe turned. Her eyes were the color of worn denim. “Because my thesis is on ecological grief in post-war American poetry. And Merwin’s The Lice is the root. It’s the taproot. He wrote it after the Vietnam War, after he saw napalm and clear-cutting, after he stopped using punctuation because he said the world no longer made continuous sense. But you can’t find it. It’s like it’s been erased.” “They have sewn themselves into our clothes /
She frowned. “Why?”