New Collected Poems

by Wendell Berry

  a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders,

  and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle

  and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy

  with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings

  of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between

  history’s death upon the place and the trees that would

  have come

  I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.

  THE FAMILIAR

  The hand is risen from the earth,

  the sap risen, leaf come back to branch,

  bird to nest crotch. Beans lift

  their heads up in the row. The known

  returns to be known again. Going

  and coming back, it forms its curves,

  a nerved ghostly anatomy in the air.

  THE FARMER AMONG THE TOMBS

  I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead,

  their headstones standing shoulder to shoulder,

  the bones imprisoned under them.

  Plow up the graveyards! Haul off the monuments!

  Pry open the vaults and the coffins

  so the dead may nourish their graves

  and go free, their acres traversed all summer

  by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees.

  FOR THE REBUILDING OF A HOUSE

  To know the inhabiting reasons

  of trees and streams, old men

  who shed their lives

  on the world like leaves,

  I watch them go.

  And I go. I build

  the place of my leaving.

  The days arc into vision

  like fish leaping, their shining

  caught in the stream.

  I watch them go

  in homage and sorrow.

  I build the place of my dream.

  I build the place of my leaving

  that the dark may come clean.

  THE SPRINGS

  In a country without saints or shrines

  I know one who made his pilgrimage

  to springs, where in his life’s dry years

  his mind held on. Everlasting,

  people called them, and gave them names.

  The water broke into sounds and shinings

  at the vein mouth, bearing the taste

  of the place, the deep rock, sweetness

  out of the dark. He bent and drank

  in bondage to the ground.

  RAIN

  It is a day of the earth’s renewing without any man’s doing or

  help.

  Though I have fields I do not go out to work in them.

  Though I have crops standing in rows I do not go out

  to look at them or gather what has ripened or hoe the weeds

  from the balks.

  Though I have animals I stay dry in the house while they graze

  in the wet.

  Though I have buildings they stand closed under their roofs.

  Though I have fences they go without me.

  My life stands in place, covered, like a hayrick or a mushroom.

  SLEEP

  I love to lie down weary

  under the stalk of sleep

  growing slowly out of my head,

  the dark leaves meshing.

  TO KNOW THE DARK

  To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

  To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

  and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

  and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

  WINTER NIGHT POEM FOR MARY

  As I started home after dark

  I looked into the sky and saw the new moon,

  an old man with a basket on his arm.

  He walked among the cedars in the bare woods.

  They stood like guardians, dark

  as he passed. He might have been singing,

  or he might not. He might have been sowing

  the spring flowers, or he might not. But I saw him

  with his basket, going along the hilltop.

  WINTER NIGHTFALL

  The fowls speak and sing, settling for the night.

  The mare shifts in the bedding.

  In her womb her foal sleeps and grows,

  within and within and within. Her jaw grinds,

  meditative in the fragrance of timothy.

  Soon now my own rest will come.

  The silent river flows on in the dusk, miles and miles.

  Outside the walls and on the roof and in the woods

  the cold rain falls.

  FEBRUARY 2, 1968

  In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,

  war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,

  I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

  MARCH 22, 1968

  As spring begins the river rises,

  filling like the sorrow of nations

  —uprooted trees, soil of squandered mountains,

  the debris of kitchens, all passing

  seaward. At dawn snow began to fall.

  The ducks, moving north, pass

  like shadows through the falling white.

  The jonquils, half open, bend down with its weight.

  The plow freezes in the furrow.

  In the night I lay awake, thinking

  of the river rising, the spring heavy

  with official meaningless deaths.

  THE MORNING’S NEWS

  To moralize the state, they drag out a man,

  and bind his hands, and darken his eyes

  with a black rag to be free of the light in them,

  and tie him to a post, and kill him.

  And I am sickened by complicity in my race.

  To kill in hot savagery like a beast

  is understandable. It is forgivable and curable.

  But to kill by design, deliberately, without wrath,

  that is the sullen labor that perfects Hell.

  The serpent in gentle, compared to man.

  It is man, the inventor of cold violence,

  death as waste, who has made himself lonely

  among the creatures, and set himself aside,

  so that he cannot work in the sun with hope,

  or sit at peace in the shade of any tree.

  The morning’s news drives sleep out of the head

  at night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyes

  open to the dark. Weary, we lie awake

  in the agony of the old giving birth to the new

  without assurance that the new will be better.

  I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s,

  they are so open to the world.

  I look at my sloping fields now turning

  green with the young grass of April. What must I do

  to go free? I think I must put on

  a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die

  rather than enter into the design of man’s hate.

  I will purge my mind of the airy claims

  of church and state. I will serve the earth

  and not pretend my life could better serve.

  Another morning comes with its strange cure.

  The earth is news. Though the river floods

  and the spring is cold, my heart goes on,

  faithful to a mystery in a cloud,

  and the summer’s garden continues its descent

  through me, toward the ground.

  ENRICHING THE EARTH

  To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

  to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds

  of winter grains and of various legumes,

  their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.

  I have stirred into the ground the offal

  and the decay of the growth of past seasons

  and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.

  All this serves the
dark. I am slowly falling

  into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,

  not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness

  and a delight to the air, and my days

  do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,

  for when the will fails so do the hands

  and one lives at the expense of life.

  After death, willing or not, the body serves,

  entering the earth. And so what was heaviest

  and most mute is at last raised up into song.

  A WET TIME

  The land is an ark, full of things waiting.

  Underfoot it goes temporary and soft, tracks

  filling with water as the foot is raised.

  The fields, sodden, go free of plans. Hands

  become obscure in their use, prehistoric.

  The mind passes over changed surfaces

  like a boat, drawn to the thought of roofs

  and to the thought of swimming and wading birds.

  Along the river croplands and gardens

  are buried in the flood, airy places grown dark

  and silent beneath it. Under the slender branch

  holding the new nest of the hummingbird

  the river flows heavy with earth, the water

  turned the color of broken slopes. I stand

  deep in the mud of the shore, a stake

  planted to measure the rise, the water rising,

  the earth falling to meet it. A great cottonwood

  passes down, the leaves shivering as the roots

  drag the bottom. I was not ready for this

  parting, my native land putting out to sea.

  THE SILENCE

  What must a man do to be at home in the world?

  There must be times when he is here

  as though absent, gone beyond words into the woven shadows

  of the grass and the flighty darknesses

  of leaves shaking in the wind, and beyond

  the sense of the weariness of engines and of his own heart,

  his wrongs grown old unforgiven. It must be with him

  as though his bones fade beyond thought

  into the shadows that grow out of the ground

  so that the furrow he opens in the earth opens

  in his bones, and he hears the silence

  of the tongues of the dead tribesmen buried here

  a thousand years ago. And then what presences will rise up

  before him, weeds bearing flowers, and the dry wind

  rain! What songs he will hear!

  IN THIS WORLD

  The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,

  tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses

  are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill

  dark floodwater moves down the river.

  The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.

  I have climbed up to water the horses

  and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,

  letting the day gather and pass. Below me

  cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,

  slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world

  men are making plans, wearing themselves out,

  spending their lives, in order to kill each other.

  THE NEW ROOF

  On the housetop, the floor of the boundless

  where birds and storms fly and disappear,

  and the valley opened over our heads, a leap

  of clarity between the hills, we bent five days

  in the sun, tearing free the old roof, nailing on

  the new, letting the sun touch for once

  in fifty years the dusky rafters, and then

  securing the house again in its shelter and shade.

  Thus like a little ledge a piece of my history

  has come between me and the sky.

  A PRAISE

  His memories lived in the place

  like fingers locked in the rock ledges

  like roots. When he died

  and his influence entered the air

  I said, Let my mind be the earth

  of his thought, let his kindness

  go ahead of me. Though I do not escape

  the history barbed in my flesh,

  certain wise movements of his hands,

  the turns of his speech

  keep with me. His hope of peace

  keeps with me in harsh days,

  the shell of his breath dimming away

  three summers in the earth.

  ON THE HILL LATE AT NIGHT

  The ripe grassheads bend in the starlight

  in the soft wind, beneath them the darkness

  of the grass, fathomless, the long blades

  rising out of the well of time. Cars

  travel the valley roads below me, their lights

  finding the dark, and racing on. Above

  their roar is a silence I have suddenly heard,

  and felt the country turn under the stars

  toward dawn. I am wholly willing to be here

  between the bright silent thousands of stars

  and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.

  The hill has grown to me like a foot.

  Until I lift the earth I cannot move.

  THE SEEDS

  The seeds begin abstract as their species,

  remote as the name on the sack

  they are carried home in: Fayette Seed Company

  Corner of Vine and Rose. But the sower

  going forth to sow sets foot

  into time to come, the seeds falling

  on his own place. He has prepared a way

  for his life to come to him, if it will.

  Like a tree, he has given roots

  to the earth, and stands free.

  THE WISH TO BE GENEROUS

  All that I serve will die, all my delights,

  the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,

  the silent lilies standing in the woods,

  the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all

  will burn in man’s evil, or dwindle

  in its own age. Let the world bring on me

  the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know

  my little light taken from me into the seed

  of the beginning and the end, so I may bow

  to mystery, and take my stand on the earth

  like a tree in a field, passing without haste

  or regret toward what will be, my life

  a patient willing descent into the grass.

  AIR AND FIRE

  From my wife and household and fields

  that I have so carefully come to in my time

  I enter the craziness of travel,

  the reckless elements of air and fire.

  Having risen up from my native land,

  I find myself smiled at by beautiful women,

  making me long for a whole life

  to devote to each one, making love to her

  in some house, in some way of sleeping

  and waking I would make only for her.

  And all over the country I find myself

  falling in love with houses, woods, and farms

  that I will never set foot in.

  My eyes go wandering through America,

  two wayfaring brothers, resting in silence

  against the forbidden gates. O what if

  an angel came to me, and said,

  “Go free of what you have done. Take

  what you want.” The atoms of blood

  and brain and bone strain apart

  at the thought. What I am is the way home.

  Like rest after a sleepless night,

  my old love comes on me in midair.

  THE LILIES

  Amid the gray trunks of ancient trees we found

  the gay woodland lilies nodding on their stems,

  frail and fair, so delicately balanced the air

/>   held or moved them as it stood or moved.

  The ground that slept beneath us woke in them

  and made a music of the light, as it had waked

  and sung in fragile things unnumbered years,

  and left their kind no less symmetrical and fair

  for all that time. Does my land have the health

  of this, where nothing falls but into life?

  INDEPENDENCE DAY

  for Gene Meatyard

  Between painting a roof yesterday and the hay

  harvest tomorrow, a holiday in the woods

  under the grooved trunks and branches, the roof

  of leaves lighted and shadowed by the sky.

  As America from England, the woods stands free

  from politics and anthems. So in the woods I stand

  free, knowing my land. My country, ‘tis of the

  drying pools along Camp Branch I sing

  where the water striders walk like Christ,

  all sons of God, and of the woods grown old

  on the stony hill where the thrush’s song rises

  in the light like a curling vine and the bobwhite’s

  whistle opens in the air, broad and pointed as a leaf.

  A STANDING GROUND

  Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse;

  Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal . . .

  However just and anxious I have been,

  I will stop and step back

  from the crowd of those who may agree

  with what I say, and be apart.

  There is no earthly promise of life or peace

  but where the roots branch and weave

  their patient silent passages in the dark;

  uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.

  I am not bound for any public place,

  but for ground of my own

  where I have planted vines and orchard trees,

  and in the heat of the day climbed up

  into the healing shadow of the woods.

  Better than any argument is to rise at dawn

  and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.