The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry
body:
the breaking
through which the new
comes, perching
above its shadow
on the piling up
darkened broken old
husks of itself:
bud opening to flower
opening to fruit opening
to the sweet marrow
of the seed—taken
from what was, from
what could have been.
What is left
is what is.
from Findings
THE DESIGN OF A HOUSE
1.
Except in idea, perfection is as wild
as light; there is no hand laid on it.
But the house is a shambles unless
the vision of its perfection
upholds it like stone.
More probable: the ideal
of its destruction:
cloud of fire prefiguring
its disappearance.
What value there is
is assumed;
like a god, the house elects its omens;
because it is, I desire it should be
—white, its life intact in it,
among trees.
Love has conceived a house,
and out of its labor
brought forth its likeness
—the emblem of desire, continuing
though the flesh falls away.
2.
We’ve come round again
to short days and long nights;
time goes;
the clocks barely keep up;
a spare dream of summer
is kept
alive in the house:
the Queen Anne’s lace
—gobletted,
green beginning to bloom,
tufted, upfurling—
unfolding
whiteness:
in this winter’s memory
more clear than ever in summer,
cold paring away excess:
the single blooming random
in the summer’s abundance
of its kind, in high relief
above the clover and grass
of the field, unstill
an instant,
the day having come upon it,
green and white
in as much light as ever was.
Opened, white, at the solstice
of its becoming, then the flower
forgets its growing;
is still;
dirt is its paradigm—
and this memory’s seeing,
a cold wind keening the outline.
3.
Winter nights the house sleeps,
a dry seedhead in the snow
falling and fallen, the white
and dark and depth of it, continuing
slow impact of silence.
The dark
rooms hold our heads on pillows, waiting
day, through the snow falling and fallen
in the darkness between inconsecutive
dreams. The brain burrows in its earth
and sleeps,
trusting dawn, though the sun’s
light is a light without precedent, never
proved ahead of its coming, waited for
by the law that hope has made it.
4.
What do you intend?
Drink blood
and speak, old ghosts. I don’t
hear you. What has it amounted to
—the unnegotiable accumulation
of your tears? Your expenditure
has purchased no reprieve. Your
failed wisdom shards among the
down-going atoms of the moment.
History goes blind and in darkness,
neither sees nor is seen, nor is
known except as a carrion
marked with unintelligible wounds;
dragging its dead body, living,
yet to be born, it moves heavily
to its glories. It tramples
the little towns, forgets their names.
5.
If reason were all, reason
would not exist—the will
to reason accounts for it;
it’s not reason that chooses
to live; the seed doesn’t swell
in its husk by reason, but loves
itself, obeys light which is
its own thought and argues the leaf
in secret; love articulates
the choice of life in fact; life
chooses life because it is
alive; what lives didn’t begin dead,
nor sun’s fire commence in ember.
Love foresees a jointure
composing a house, a marriage
of contraries, compendium
of opposites in equilibrium.
This morning the sun
came up before the moon set;
shadows were stripped from the house
like burnt rags, the sky turning
blue behind the clear moon,
day and night moving to day.
Let severances be as dividing
budleaves around the flower
—woman and child enfolded, chosen.
It’s a dying begun, not lightly,
the taking up of this love
whose legacy is its death.