On the poem "Thanks," by WS Merwin (written in 2020)

 On my first reading of "Thanks," I teared up, and maybe on the second one too.  Maybe both times were when I was in the mode of talking at gratitude but not feeling it, and the poem's litany of mostly-dark events reached where my feelings were.  "Funerals," "wars," "animals dying," "forests falling"--somewhere in there was some of what was choking me up.  And I got to let some of it out.

Then, COVID arrived, and then the murder of George Floyd, and this national, toxic darkness embodied by Trump seemed in both instances to eclipse the shapes, names and faces of the dead.  And of course George Floyd's murder being one of horrifyingly many of exactly the same kind, but manipulated by the nation's quasi-fascist pseudo-leadership--I went into the numb, hovering mode of waiting for it all to be over that seems too internally brutal for tears, but somehow not for the poem's whole middle two stanzas to do some silent, vibrant work in me:

back from a series of hospitals back 

     from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are 

     saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and

      in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the

      door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying 

      thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

It's like those stanzas tick off boxes of what COVID has brought my way--"over telephones" is almost all of my life at the moment, through the screen of mine I see "a series of hospitals" including those set up to handle the overflow and then "the news of the dead" of this pandemic, I see police beatings of nonviolent nonwhite Americans, and the mugging in more than one sense is being done being done right in the public eye by a rich man who's become not only an official but the most powerful one in the world, and who only seems likely to change for the better if it's from a suit into an orange jumpsuit.

And that horror goes on, but also "we go on."  There and throughout the poem, the pronoun stays plural--identifying with the subject of the poem, I'm not alone.

And then I notice that no "thank you" in the poem (I count fourteen) are for any of these events in the poem.  If I say "thank you," I generally make it for something, and I assume that about anyone else's saying of it also.  "Thank you."  "For what?"  And juxtapositions in the poem would suggest that it's for all the damage, so the thanks would either be bleakly ironic or coming from some space of abuse.  Except thanks also tend to be addressed to someone, and these are not addressed to anyone, I see in the last stanza's "with nobody listening we are saying thank you."  If they're not to anyone, then why do they need to be for anything?  So, "we are saying thank you"  while, not because, these dark times keep coming.  

So if the thanks aren't for (as in addressed to) anyone, or for (as in about) anything, what do they do?  How do they help me find some grounding in the face of multiple, concurrent national nightmares (that might yet, unthinkably, continue in whatever forms for another four years)?

When I got to hear Merwin read at AWP one year, he read after Anne Carson, and talked kindly about how difficult it was to read after her.  I had been introduced to her work maybe seven years before that, by way of some of her translations of classical poets, and found something, for me, new and truly helpful:  a space opened by the poem that drew from the accessible and the monumental, or the ancient, at the same time.  I wasn't being intimidated by tradition; I was getting a friendly hand up (or in, or down) to some of it.

And I believe I get that gift in, or out of, this poem too, because Merwin's speaker is actually a chorus, isn't it (or he, or we)?  Like in Sophocles and beyond?  But here the ancient is made war for me again--there are no names i don't know, there are no impossibly lofty goals expressed, and his lack of capitalization and punctuation here take away restrictions on even how to read this chorus's lines, so I can get at home in it, find where and how it fits me, where and how I am right now.

And I find the thanks to no one in particular to be another way of saying yes, this is.  It's all happening, and I am not outside of it, not even in one of the "glass rooms" of stanza 1.  I'm in its midst.  And more importantly, maybe more important than the facts of all these realized nightmares, is the one that I'm not alone.  Connected by phone to my loved ones, I don't have to witness any of this without them.  Perhaps unlike the desperate men who have driven these crises for their own gain (like dictators have since there were Greek choruses and before), I deeply love and am deeply loved.

Stephanie Burt wrote about "spiritual resistance" in Merwin's work, and I believe I find that in "Thanks."  The resistance isn't in the mode of war, which the speaker(s) don't fight but remember; it's in this persistence of an unbreakable common bond between people.  It reminds me that the statues of ancient dictators may first and foremost present reminders that the dictators themselves are long gone, and of the many and intangible gifts I've been given in the midst of this time of crisis, "dark though it is."