Anniversaries

By Tracy

I'm one of those people in whose minds particular dates seem to brand themselves, so that I can't help but note them passing each year -- yesterday ten years since the death of John Forbes, today two years since that of someone else I once knew, a strange pairing of two anniversaries that is peculiar to me, since the two people were unconnected in life. It sounds morbid, but it's not entirely -- birthdays and other dates engrave themselves into my psyche in a similar fashion. I cannot-not-notice them.

So today I am thinking of W. S. Merwin's poem "For the anniversary of my death" ("Every year without knowing it I have passed the day...") which is from The Second Four Books of Poems (Copper Canyon, 1993), and can also be read at

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171868

and just in general of the strangely private nature of calendars, that exists alongside their public function...