eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619022584 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 09/16/2013 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 1,002,179 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Preface: From Sabbaths 2013
I
This is a poet of the river lands,
a lowdown man of the deepest depth of the valley, where gravity gathers the waters, the poisons, the trash,
where light comes late and leaves early.
From the window of his small room the lowdown poet looks out. He watches the river for ripples, flashes, signs of beings rising in the undersurface dark,
or lightly swimming upon the flow,
or, for a minnow, descending the deeps of the air to enter and shatter forever their momentary reflections,
for the river is a place passing through a passing place.
The poet, his window, and his poems are creatures of the shore that the river gnaws, dissolves, and carries away.
He is a tree of a sort, rooted in the dark, aspiring to the light,
dependent on both. His poems are leavings, sheddings, gathered from the light, as it has come,
and offered to the dark, which he believes must shine with sight,
with light, dark only to him.
II
Times will come as they must,
by necessity or his wish, when he leaves his enclosure and his window,
his homescape of house and garden,
barn and pasture, the incarnate life of his desire, thought, and daily work.
His grazing animals look up to watch in silence as he departs.
He sets out at times without even a path or any guidance other than knowledge of the place and himself as they were in time already past. He goes among trees,
climbing again the one hill of his life.
With his hand full of words he goes into the wordless, wording it barely in time as he passes. One by one he places words, balancing on each as on a small stone in the swift flow in his anxious patience until the next arrives, until he has come at last again into presentiment of the Real, the wholly real in its grand composure, for which as before he knows no word. And here again he must stop. Here by luck or grace he may find rest, which he has been seeking all along. Sometimes by the time's flaws and his own, he fails. And then by luck or grace he will be given another day to try again, to go maybe yet farther before again he must stop.
He is a gatherer of fragments, a cobbler of pieces. Piece by piece he tells a story without end, for in the time of this world no end can come.
It is the story of eternity's shining,
much shadowed, much put off,
in time. And time, however long, falls short.
1979
I
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
II
Another Sunday morning comes And I resume the standing Sabbath Of the woods, where the finest blooms Of time return, and where no path
Is worn but wears its makers out At last, and disappears in leaves Of fallen seasons. The tracked rut Fills and levels; here nothing grieves
In the risen season. Past life Lives in the living. Resurrection Is in the way each maple leaf Commemorates its kind, by connection
Outreaching understanding. What rises Rises into comprehension And beyond. Even falling raises In praise of light. What is begun
Is unfinished. And so the mind That comes to rest among the bluebells Comes to rest in motion, refined By alteration. The bud swells,
Opens, makes seed, falls, is well,
Being becoming what it is:
Miracle and parable Exceeding thought, because it is
Immeasurable; the understander Encloses understanding, thus Darkens the light. We can stand under No ray that is not dimmed by us.
The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend:
Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend.
Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by Your will, not ours. And it is fit Our only choice should be to die Into that rest, or out of it.
III
To sit and look at light-filled leaves May let us see, or seem to see,
Far backward as through clearer eyes To what unsighted hope believes:
The blessed conviviality That sang Creation's seventh sunrise,
Time when the Maker's radiant sight Made radiant every thing He saw,
And every thing He saw was filled With perfect joy and life and light.
His perfect pleasure was sole law;
No pleasure had become self-willed.
For all His creatures were His pleasures And their whole pleasure was to be What He made them; they sought no gain Or growth beyond their proper measures,
Nor longed for change or novelty.
The only new thing could be pain.
IV
The bell calls in the town Where forebears cleared the shaded land And brought high daylight down To shine on field and trodden road.
I hear, but understand Contrarily, and walk into the woods.
I leave labor and load,
Take up a different story.
I keep an inventory Of wonders and of uncommercial goods.
I climb up through the field That my long labor has kept clear.
Projects, plans unfulfilled Waylay and snatch at me like briars,
For there is no rest here Where ceaseless effort seems to be required,
Yet fails, and spirit tires With flesh, because failure And weariness are sure In all that mortal wishing has inspired.
I go in pilgrimage Across an old fenced boundary To wildness without age Where, in their long dominion,
The trees have been left free.
They call the soil here "Eden" — slants and steeps Hard to stand straight up on Even without a burden.
No more a perfect garden,
There's an immortal memory that it keeps.
I leave work's daily rule And come here to this restful place Where music stirs the pool And from high stations of the air Fall notes of wordless grace,
Strewn remnants of the primal Sabbath's hymn.
And I remember here A tale of evil twined With good, serpent and vine,
And innocence as evil's stratagem.
I let that go a while,
For it is hopeless to correct By generations' toil,
And I let go my hopes and plans That no toil can perfect.
There is no vision here but what is seen:
White bloom nothing explains But a mute blessedness Exceeding all distress,
The fresh light stained a hundred shades of green.
Uproar of wheel and fire That has contained us like a cell Opens and lets us hear A stillness longer than all time Where leaf and song fulfill The passing light, pass with the light, return,
Renewed, as in a rhyme.
This is no human vision Subject to our revision;
God's eye holds every leaf as light is worn.
Ruin is in place here:
The dead leaves rotting on the ground,
The live leaves in the air Are gathered in a single dance That turns them round and round.
The fox cub trots his almost pathless path As silent as his absence.
These passings resurrect A joy without defect,
The life that steps and sings in ways of death.
V
How many have relinquished Breath, in grief or rage,
The victor and the vanquished Named on the bitter page
Alike, or indifferently Forgot — all that they did Undone entirely.
The dust they stirred has hid
Their faces and their works,
Has settled, and lies still.
Nobody rests or shirks Who must turn in time's mill.
They wind the turns of the mill In house and field and town;
As grist is ground to meal The grinders are ground down.
VI
What stood will stand, though all be fallen,
The good return that time has stolen.
Though creatures groan in misery,
Their flesh prefigures liberty To end travail and bring to birth Their new perfection in new earth.
At word of that enlivening Let the trees of the woods all sing And every field rejoice, let praise Rise up out of the ground like grass.
What stood, whole in every piecemeal Thing that stood, will stand though all Fall — field and woods and all in them Rejoin the primal Sabbath's hymn.
VII
What if, in the high, restful sanctuary That keeps the memory of Paradise,
We're followed by the drone of history And greed's poisonous fumes still burn our eyes?
Disharmony recalls us to our work.
From Heavenly work of light and wind and leaf We must turn back into the peopled dark Of our unraveling century, the grief
Of waste, the agony of haste and noise.
It is a hard return from Sabbath rest To lifework of the fields, yet we rejoice,
Returning, less condemned in being blessed
By vision of what human work can make:
A harmony between forest and field,
The world as it was given for love's sake,
The world by love and loving work revealed
As given to our children and our Maker.
In that healed harmony the world is used But not destroyed, the Giver and the taker Joined, the taker blessed, in the unabused
Gift that nurtures and protects. Then workday And Sabbath live together in one place.
Though mortal, incomplete, that harmony Is our one possibility of peace.
When field and woods agree, they make a rhyme That stirs in distant memory the whole First Sabbath's song that no largess of time Or hope or sorrow wholly can recall.
But harmony of earth is Heaven-made,
Heaven-making, is promise and is prayer,
A little song to keep us unafraid,
An earthly music magnified in air.
VIII
I go from the woods into the cleared field:
A place no human made, a place unmade By human greed, and to be made again.
Where centuries of leaves once built by dying A deathless potency of light and stone And mold of all that grew and fell, the timeless Fell into time. The earth fled with the rain,
The growth of fifty thousand years undone In a few careless seasons, stripped to rock And clay — a "new land," truly, that no race Was ever native to, but hungry mice And sparrows and the circling hawks, dry thorns And thistles sent by generosity Of new beginning. No Eden, this was A garden once, a good and perfect gift;
Its possible abundance stood in it As it then stood. But now what it might be Must be foreseen, darkly, through many lives —
Thousands of years to make it what it was,
Beginning now, in our few troubled days.
IX
Enclosing the field within bounds sets it apart from the boundless of which it was, and is, a part,
and places it within care.
The bounds of the field bind the mind to it. A bride adorned, the field now wears the green veil of a season's abounding. Open the gate!
Open it wide, that time and hunger may come in.
X
Whatever is foreseen in joy Must be lived out from day to day,
Vision held open in the dark By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that The hand must ache, the face must sweat.
And yet no leaf or grain is filled By work of ours; the field is tilled And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we're asleep.
When we work well, a Sabbath mood Rests on our day, and finds it good.
XI
To long for what can be fulfilled in time Foredooms the body to the use of light,
Light into light returning, as the stream
Of days flows downward through us into night,
And into light and life and time to come.
This is the way of death: loss of what might
Have been in what must come to be, light's sum Lost in the having, having to forego.
The year drives on toward what it will become.
In answer to their names called long ago The creatures all have risen and replied Year after year, each toward the distant glow
Of its perfection in all, glorified;
Have failed. Year after year they all disperse As the leaves fall, and not to be denied
The frost falls on the grass as by a curse.
The leaves flame, fall, and carry down their light By a hard justice in the universe
Against all fragmentary things. Their flight Sends them downward into the dark, unseen Empowerment of a universal right
That brings them back to air and light again,
One grand motion, implacable, sublime.
The calling of all creatures is design.
We long for what can be fulfilled in time,
Though death is in the cost. There is a craving As in delayed completion of a rhyme
To know what may be had by loss of having,
To see what loss of time will make of seed In earth or womb, dark come to light, the saving
Of what was lost in what will come — repaid In the invisible pattern that will mark Whatever of the passing light is made.
Choosing the light in which the sun is dark,
The stars dark, and all mortal vision blind —
That puts us out of thought and out of work,
And dark by day, in heart dark, dark in mind,
Mistaking for a song our lonely cry,
We turn in wrongs of love against our kind;
The fall returns. Our deeds and days gone by Take root, bear fruit, are carried on, in faith Or fault, through deaths all mortal things must die,
The deaths of time and pain, and death's own death In full-filled light and song, final Sabbath.
XII
To long for what eternity fulfills Is to forsake the light one has, or wills To have, and go into the dark, to wait What light may come — no light perhaps, the dark Insinuates. And yet the dark conceals All possibilities: thought, word, and light,
Air, water, earth, motion, and song, the arc Of lives through light, eyesight, hope, rest, and work —
And death, the narrow gate each one must pass Alone, as some have gone past every guess Into the woods by a path lost to all Who look back, gone past light and sound of day Into grief's wordless catalogue of loss.
As the known life is given up, birdcall Become the only language of the way,
The leaves all shine with sudden light, and stay.
1980
I
What hard travail God does in death!
He strives in sleep, in our despair,
And all flesh shudders underneath The nightmare of His sepulcher.
The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;
All night the cold wind heaves and pries;
Creation strains sinew and bone Against the dark door where He lies.
The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight And stands. Pain breaks in song. Surprising The merely dead, graves fill with light Like opened eyes. He rests in rising.
II
The eager dog lies strange and still Who roamed the woods with me;
Then while I stood or climbed the hill Or sat under a tree,
Awaiting what more time might say,
He thrashed in undergrowth,
Pursuing what he scared away,
Made ruckus for us both.
He's dead; I go more quiet now,
Stillness added to me By time and sorrow, mortal law,
By loss of company
That his new absence has made new.
Though it must come by doom,
This quiet comes by kindness too,
And brings me nearer home,
For as I walk the wooded land The morning of God's mercy,
Beyond the work of mortal hand,
Seen by more than I see,
The quiet deer look up and wait,
Held still in quick of grace.
And I wait, stop footstep and thought.
We stand here face to face.
III
Great deathly powers have passed:
The black and bitter cold, the wind That broke and felled strong trees, the rind Of ice that held at last
Even the fleshly heart In cold that made it seem a stone.
And now there comes again the one First Sabbath light, the Art
That unruled, uninvoked,
Unknown, makes new again and heals,
Restores heart's flesh so that it feels Anew the old deadlocked
Goodness of its true home That it will lose again and mourn,
Remembering the year reborn In almost perfect bloom
In almost shadeless wood,
Sweet air that neither burned nor chilled In which the tenderest flowers prevailed,
The light made flesh and blood.
IV
The frog with lichened back and golden thigh Sits still, almost invisible On leafed and lichened stem,
Invisibility Its sign of being at home There in its given place, and well.
The warbler with its quivering striped throat Would live almost beyond my sight,
Almost beyond belief,
But for its double note —
Among high leaves a leaf,
At ease, at home in air and light.
And I, through woods and fields, through fallen days,
Am passing to where I belong:
At home, at ease, and well,
In Sabbaths of this place Almost invisible,
Toward which I go from song to song.
V
Six days of work are spent To make a Sunday quiet That Sabbath may return.
It comes in unconcern;
We cannot earn or buy it.
Suppose rest is not sent Or comes and goes unknown,
The light, unseen, unshown.
Suppose the day begins In wrath at circumstance,
Or anger at one's friends In vain self-innocence False to the very light,
Breaking the sun in half,
Or anger at oneself Whose controverting will Would have the sun stand still.
The world is lost in loss Of patience; the old curse Returns, and is made worse As newly justified.
In hopeless fret and fuss,
In rage at worldly plight Creation is defied,
All order is unpropped,
All light and singing stopped.
VI
The intellect so ravenous to know And in its knowing hold the very light,
Disclosing what is so and what not so,
Must finally know the dark, which is its right And liberty; it's blind in what it sees.
Bend down, go in by this low door, despite
The thorn and briar that bar the way. The trees Are young here in the heavy undergrowth Upon an old field worn out by disease
Of human understanding; greed and sloth Did bad work that this thicket now conceals,
Work lost to rain or ignorance or both.
The young trees make a darkness here that heals,
And here the forms of human thought dissolve Into the living shadow that reveals
All orders made by mortal hand or love Or thought come to a margin of their kind,
Are lost in order we are ignorant of,
Which stirs great fear and sorrow in the mind.
The field, if it will thrive, must do so by Exactitude of thought, by skill of hand,
And by the clouded mercy of the sky;
It is a mortal clarity between Two darks, of Heaven and of earth. The why
Of it is our measure. Seen and unseen,
Its causes shape it as it is, a while.
O bent by fear and sorrow, now bend down,
Leave word and argument, be dark and still,
And come into the joy of healing shade.
Rest from your work. Be still and dark until
You grow as unopposing, unafraid As the young trees, without thought or belief;
Until the shadow Sabbath light has made
Shudders, breaks open, shines in every leaf.
Excerpted from "This Day"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Wendell Berry.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Preface: A Timbered Choir: Sabbath Poems 1979-1997,
This Day: An Introduction,
Preface: From Sabbaths 2013,
I: This is a poet of the river lands,
II: Times will come as they must,
1979,
1980,
1981,
1982,
1983,
1984,
1985,
1986,
1.,
1987,
1988,
1989,
1990,
1991,
1992,
1993,
1994,
1995,
1996,
1997,
1998,
1999,
2000,
2001,
2002,
2003,
2004,
2005,
2006,
2007,
2008,
2009,
2010,
2011,
2012,
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
