The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry
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This is a love poem for you, Tanya—
among wars, among the brutal forfeitures
of time, in this house, among its latent fires,
among all that honesty must see, I accept
your dying, and love you: nothing mitigates
—and for our Mary, chosen by the blind
hungering of our blood, precious and periled
in her happy mornings; whose tears are mine.
7.
There’s still a degree of sleep
recalls
the vast empty dream I slept in
as a child
sometimes contained a chaos, tangled
like fishline snarled in hooks—
sometimes a hook, whetted, severe,
drawing
the barbed darkness to a point;
sometimes I seemed merely to be falling.
The house, also, has taken shape in it.
8.
And l have dreamed
of the morning coming in
like a bird through the window
not burdened by a thought,
the light a singing
as I hoped.
It comes in and sings
on the corner of the white washstand,
among coleus stems and roots
in a clear green bottle
on the black tabletop
beneath the window,
under the purple coleus leaves,
among spearing
green philodendron leaves,
on the white washstand:
a small yellow bird with black wings,
darting in and out.
9.
To imagine the thoughtlessness
of a thoughtless thing
is useless.
The mind must sing
of itself to keep awake.
Love has visualized a house,
and out of its expenditure.
fleshed the design
at this cross ways
of consciousness and time:
its form is growth
come to light in it;
croplands, gardens,
are of its architecture,
labor its realization;
solstice is the height
of its consciousness,
thicket a figuration
of its waking;
plants and stars are made convergent
in its windows;
cities we have gone to and come back
are the prospect of its doorways.
And there’s a city it dreams of:
salt-white beside the water.
10.
Waking comes into sleep like a dream:
violet dawn over the snow, the black trees.
Snow and the house’s white make a white
the black swifts may come back to.
THREE ELEGIAC POEMS
Harry Erdman Perry, 1881-1965
I
Let him escape hospital and doctor,
the manners and odors of strange places,
the dispassionate skills of experts.
Let him go free of tubes and needles,
public corridors, the surgical white
of life dwindled to poor pain.
Foreseeing the possibility of life without
possibility of joy, let him give it up.
Let him die in one of the old rooms
of his living, no stranger near him.
Let him go in peace out of the bodies
of his life—
flesh and marriage and household.
From the wide vision of his own windows
let him go out of sight; and the final
time and light of his life’s place be
last seen before his eyes’ slow
opening in the earth.
Let him go like one familiar with the way
into the wooded and tracked and
furrowed hill, his body.
II
I stand at the cistern in front of the old barn
in the darkness, in the dead of winter,
the night strangely warm, the wind blowing,
rattling an unlatched door.
I draw the cold water up out of the ground, and drink.
At the house the light is still waiting.
An old man I have loved all my life is dying
in his bed there. He is going
slowly down from himself.
In final obedience to his life, he follows
his body out of our knowing.
Only his hands, quiet on the sheet, keep
a painful resemblance to what they no longer are.
III
He goes free of the earth.
The sun of his last day sets
clear in the sweetness of his liberty.
The earth recovers from his dying,
the hallow of his life remaining
in all his death leaves.
Radiances know him. Grown lighter
than breath, he is set free
in our remembering. Grown brighter
than vision, he goes dark
into the life of the hill
that holds his peace.
He is hidden among all that is,
and cannot be lost.
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