NEW COLLECTED POEMS
Wendell Berry
NEW COLLECTED
POEMS
Wendell Berry
Copyright © Wendell Berry 2012
All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-6190-2047-4
Cover design by Gerilyn Attebery
Interior design by David Bullen
COUNTER POINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
TO TANYA, AS BEFORE
Contents
Preface: The Country of Déja Vu
THE BROKEN GROUND (1964)
Elegy
Observance
Boone
Green and White
A Man Walking and Singing
The Companions
The Aristocracy
The Bird Killer
An Architecture
Canticle
Sparrow
A Music
To Go By Singing
The Wild
May Song
The Fear of Darkness
The Plan
The Guest
The Thief
The Broken Ground
FINDINGS (1969)
The Design of the House: Ideal and Hard Time
The Handing Down
Three Elegiac Poems
OPENINGS (1968)
The Thought of Something Else
My Great-Grandfather’s Slaves
October 10
The Snake
The Cold
To My Children, Fearing for Them
The Winter Rain
March Snow
April Woods: Morning
The Finches
The Porch over the River
Before Dark
The Dream
The Sycamore
The Meadow
Against the War in Vietnam
Dark with Power
In Memory: Stuart Egnal
The Want of Peace
The Peace of Wild Things
Grace
To Think of the Life of a Man
Marriage
Do Not Be Ashamed
Window Poems
To a Siberian Woodsman
A Discipline
A Poem of Thanks
Envoy
FARMING: A HAND BOOK (1970)
The Man Born to Farming
The Stones
The Supplanting
Sowing
The Familiar
The Farmer Among the Tombs
For the Rebuilding of a House
The Springs
Rain
Sleep
To Know the Dark
Winter Night Poem for Mary
Winter Nightfall
February 2, 1968
March 22, 1968
The Morning’s News
Enriching the Earth
A Wet Time
The Silence
In This World
The New Roof
A Praise
On the Hill Late at Night
The Seeds
The Wish to Be Generous
Air and Fire
The Lilies
Independence Day
A Standing Ground
Song in a Year of Catastrophe
The Current
The Mad Farmer Revolution
The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer
The Farmer and the Sea
Earth and Fire
The Mad Farmer in the City
The Birth (Near Port William)
Awake at Night
Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer
The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer
Meditation in the Spring Rain
The Grandmother
The Heron
September 2, 1969
The Farmer, Speaking of Monuments
The Sorrel Filly
To the Unseeable Animal
THE COUNTRY OF MARRIAGE (1973)
The Old Elm Tree by the River
Poem
Breaking
The Country of Marriage
Prayer after Eating
Her First Calf
Kentucky River Junction
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
A Marriage, an Elegy
The Arrival
A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall
The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment
Planting Trees
The Wild Geese
The Silence
Anger Against Beasts
At a Country Funeral
The Recognition
Planting Crocuses
Praise
The Gathering
A Homecoming
The Mad Farmer’s Love Song
Testament
The Clear Days
Song
Poem for J.
The Long Hunter
An Anniversary
CLEARING (1977)
History
Where
The Clearing
Work Song
From the Crest
A PART (1980)
Stay Home
To Gary Snyder
For the Hog Killing
Goods
The Adze
The Cold Pane
Falling Asleep
A Purification
A Dance
The Fear of Love
Seventeen Years
To What Listens
Woods
The Lilies
Forty Years
A Meeting
Another Descent
Below
The Star
The Hidden Singer
The Necessity of Faith
To the Holy Spirit
Ripening
The Way of Pain
We Who Prayed and Wept
Grief
Fall
An Autumn Burning
A Warning to My Readers
Creation Myth
The First
Walking on the River Ice
Throwing Away the Mail
Except
For the Future
Traveling at Home
July, 1773
The Slip
Horses
THE WHEEL (1982)
Requiem
Elegy
Rising
Desolation
The Strait
The Law That Marries All Things
Setting Out
Song (1)
From the Distance
Letter
Returning
To Tanya at Christmas
Song (2)
The River Bridged and Forgot
The Gift of Gravity
Song (3)
The Wheel
The Dance
Passing the Strait
Our Children, Coming of Age
Song (4)
In Rain
ENTRIES (1994)
For the Explainers
A Marriage Song
Voices Late at Night
The Record
A Parting
One of Us
Thirty More Years
The Wild Rose
The Blue Robe
The Venus of Botticelli
In a Motel Parking Lot, Thinking of Dr. Williams
To My Mother
On a Theme of Chaucer
The Reassurer
Let Us Pledge
The Vacation
A Lover’s Song
Anglo-Saxon Protestant Heterosexual Men
Air
The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union
Duality
The Three
To Hayden Carruth
Noguchi Fountain
Spring
Imagination
For an Absence
The Storm
In Extremis: Poems about My Father
Epitaph
Come Forth
GIVEN (2005)
Dust
In a Country Once Forested
To Tanya on My Sixtieth Birthday
They
Cathedral
Dante
The Millennium
June Wind
Why
The Rejected Husband
The Inlet
Listen!
In Art Rowanberry’s Barn
Burley Coulter’s Song for Kate Helen Branch
How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)
Words
To a Writer of Reputation
Seventy Years
A Passing Thought
The Leader
The Ongoing Holy War Against Evil
Some Further Words
Lysimachia Nummularia
LEAVINGS (2010)
Like Snow
On the Theory of the Big Bang as the Origin of the Universe
Look It Over
A Letter (to Ed McClanahan)
A Letter (to my brother)
A Letter (to Hayden Carruth)
A Letter (to Ernest J. Gaines)
Give It Time
Questionnaire
And I Beg Your Pardon
David Jones
Tu Fu
A Speech to the Garden Club of America (With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe)
While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and BigBangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row
Men Untrained to Comfort
Over the Edge
Index of Titles and First Lines
The Country of Déjà Vu
My old poems—I liked them all
well enough when they were new.
They came through the air, I wrote them down,
and sent them on, as also I fed
the birds who descended here to eat
as they were passing through. Now
I’m asked to read those poems again.
What for? They all are from the Country
of Déjà Vu, which is where
I have no need to go back to.
THE BROKEN GROUND
(1964)
For my mother and father
ELEGY
Pryor Thomas Berry
March 4, 1864 – February 23, 1946
I.
All day our eyes could find no resting place.
Over a flood of snow sight came back
Empty to the mind. The sun
In a shutter of clouds, light
Staggered down the fall of snow.
All circling surfaces of earth were white.
No shape or shadow moved the flight
Of winter birds. Snow held the earth its silence.
We could pick no birdsong from the wind.
At nightfall our father turned his eyes away.
It was this storm of silence shook out his ghost.
2.
We sleep; he only wakes
Who is unshapen in a night of snow.
His shadow in the shadow of the earth
Moves the dark to wholeness.
We wait beside his body here, his image
Shape of silence in the room.
3.
Sifting
Down the wind, the winter rain
Spirals about the town
And the church hill’s jut of stones.
Under the mounds, below
The weather’s moving, the numb dead know
No fitfulness of wind.
On the road that in his knowledge ends
We bear our father to the earth.
We have adorned the shuck of him
With flowers as for a bridal, burned
Lamps about him, held death apart
Until the grave should mound it whole.
Behind us rain breaks the corners
Of our father’s house, quickens
On the downslope to noise.
Our steps
Clamor in his silence, who tracked
The sun to autumn in the dust.
Below the hill
The river bears the rain away, that cut
His fields their shape and stood them dry.
Water wearing the earth
Is the shape of the earth,
The river flattening in its bends.
Their mingling held
Ponderable in his words—
Knowledge polished on a stone.
4.
River and earth and sun and wind disjoint,
Over his silence flow apart. His words
Are sharp to memory as cold rain
But are not ours.
We stare dumb
Upon the fulcrum dust, across which death
Lifts up our love. There is no more to add
To this perfection. We turn away
Into the shadow of his death.
Time in blossom and fruit and seed,
Time in the dust huddles in his darkness.
The world, spun in its shadow, holds all.
Until the morning comes his death is ours.
Until morning comes say of the blind bird:
His feet are netted with darkness, or he flies
His heart’s distance in the darkness of his eyes.
A season’s sun will light him no tree green.
5.
Spring tangles shadow and light,
Branches of trees
Knit vision and wind.
The shape of the wind is a tree
Bending, spilling its birds.
From the cloud to the stone
The rain stands tall,
Columned into his darkness.
The church hill heals our father in.
Our remembering moves from a different place.
OBSERVANCE
The god of the river leans
against the shore in the early
morning, resting from his caprices;
the gentle sun parades
on his runneled gaze—he devotes
himself to watching it as one
devotes oneself to sleep;
the light becomes
his consciousness, warming him.
The river clears after the winter
floods; the slopes of the hills renew
the sun, diaphanous flower and leaf, blue-green
with distance;
this idle god dallies
in his shade, his mind adorned with stones.
At the river’s edge there is singing;
the townsmen have come down from their sleep,
their singing silences the birds;
they sing renewal beyond irreparable
divisions.
The god did not expect
these worshippers, but he hears
them singing, briefly as reeds
grown up by the water;
they go
away, the river re-enters
their silence
—and he watches
a white towboat approach, shoving
its rust-colored island of barges,
the sound of its engines filling his mind
and draining out;
the forked wake
wrinkles on his vision, pointing
to the corner of his eye,
and floats away;
the holiday fishermen
arrive—
a man and his wife
establish themselves
on a sandbar, bringing
lunch in a basket, blankets, tackle
down the path through the young
horseweeds;
the woman smooths
a blanket on the sand, and begins
a ponderous sunbath, her eyes
covered, her skirt hoisted
above her knees;
the man
casts a baited line downstream
and uncaps a beer:
the god observes;
these are the sundry
objects of his thought.
He has watched the passing
of other boats, assemblages,
seasons, inundations,
boatmen
whose voyages bore down the currents
to the dark shores of their eyes
—and has forgotten them, innocent
of his seasonal wraths, his mischiefs
accomplished and portending, as his present
forbearance is innocent;
the perfection
of his forgetting allows the sun
to glitter
—the light
flows away, its blue and white
peeling off the green waves.
His mind contains
the river as its banks
constrain it, in a single act
receiving it and letting it go.
BOONE
Beyond this final house
I’ll make no journeys, that is
the nature of this place,
I came here old; the house contains
the shade of its walls,
a fire in winter; I know
from what direction to expect the wind;
still
I move in the descent
of days from what was dreamed
to what remains.
In the stillness of this single place
where I’m resigned to die
I’m not free of journeys:
one eye watches while the other sleeps
—every day is a day’s remove
from what I knew.
We held a country in our minds
which, unpossessed, allowed
the encroachment of our dreams;
our vision descended like doves
at morning on valleys still blue
in the extremity of hills
until we moved in a prodigy of reckonings,
sustaining in the toil of a journey
the rarity of our desire.
We came there at the end of spring,
climbing out of the hill’s shadow
in the evening,
the light
leaned quiet on the trees,
we’d foreseen no words;
after nightfall when the coals of our fire
contained all that was left
of vision, my journey relinquished me
to sleep;
kindling in the uneasy
darkness where we
broached our coming to the place we’d dreamed
the dying green of those valleys