2114

An Anniversary

What we have been becomes
The country where we are.
Spring goes, summer comes,
And in the heat, as one year
Or a thousand years before,
The fields and woods prepare
The burden of their seed
Out of time's wound, the old
Richness of the fall. Their deed
Is renewal. In the household
Of the woods the past
Is always healing in the light,
The high shiftings of the air.
It stands upon its yield
And thrives. Nothing is lost.
What yields, though in despair,
Opens and rises in the night.
Love binds us to this term
With its yes that is crying
In our marrow to confirm
Life that only lives by dying.
Lovers live by the moon
Whose dark and light are one,
Changing without rest.
The root struts from the seed
In the earth's dark - harvest
And feast at the edge of sleep.
Darkened, we are carried
Out of need, deep
In the country we have married.

-Wendell Berry

1712

Night Music

I think of the nightfall all the time.
I think of the dark pine trees
                                                       leaning out of the sky
Backlit by diminishing twilight, then not backlit.
I think of the way the tree frogs pitch
And pull in their summer dance.
I think of how the wind comes in from thousands of miles away.
I think of how the darkness abides.

The world's a slick rock we've got to cross,
The air, as Cavalcanti says, tremulous with light
And everywhere nicked with voices and little outcries.
Whose are they, and who are they,
                                                                their wings horizon edged,
Their bodies as soft as clouds, their skins tattooed and laid bare and
Graffitied with desolation?
Dreams of them enter, like things alive, the rooms where our loves lie
      sleeping.

Listen to what the book says–
Woe to you because of the fire that burns in you, for it is insatiable.
Woe to you because of the wheel that turns in your mind.
This is the way the night comes on,
                                                                 a narrow and shapeless place,
A few rehearsals among the insects, a few stars,
The thing invisible brought to naught, and back among visible things.
This is the way it all ends.

-- Charles Wright A Short History of the Shadow

Charles Wright

2230

if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

                                   (suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)

- E.E. Cummings

2282

The flame intensifies the pleasure of seeing beyond what is usually seen. It compels us to look.

-- Gaston Bachelard The Flame of a Candle
Tr. Joni Caldwell

1896

We stand as in an open field,
blossom, leaf, and stem,
rooted and shaken in our day,
heads nodding in the wind.

-- Wendell Berry, lines from 'The Fear of Love'