New Collected Poems Read online

  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