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Overview
Each of the thirty–five poems in this collection is concerned with this metaphor. The long sequence that is itself entitled "The Country of Marriage," perhaps the finest single work in the book, is a grave, moving, and beautifully wrought love poem. But the shorter lyrics have an equal grace and beauty—writing that contains the exhilarating lucidity of mountain spring water. And there are most notably, several more poems about the "Mad Farmer," who advises us here to 'every day do something that won't compute.'
Berry has here perfected a work that is immediately accessible but that becomes, as we read it again, always more satisfying, reverberant with manifold meanings.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619022072 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 64 |
| File size: | 217 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Old Elm Tree by the River
Shrugging in the flight of its leaves,
it is dying. Death is slowly standing up in its trunk and branches like a camouflaged hunter. In the night I am wakened by one of its branches crashing down, heavy as a wall, and then lie sleepless, the world changed.
That is a life I know the country by.
Mine is a life I know the country by.
Willing to live and die, we stand here,
timely and at home, neighborly as two men.
Our place is changing in us as we stand,
and we hold up the weight that will bring us down.
In us the land enacts its history.
When we stood it was beneath us, and was the strength by which we held to it and stood, the daylight over it a mighty blessing we cannot bear for long.
Poem
Willing to die,
you give up your will. Keep still until, moved by what moves all else, you move.
Breaking
Did I believe I had a clear mind?
It was like the water of a river flowing shallow over the ice. And now that the rising water has broken the ice, I see that what I thought was the light is part of the dark.
The Country of Marriage
1
I dream of you walking at night along the streams of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the
nightsongs of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my
sleep.
2
This comes after silence. Was it something I said that bound me to you, some mere promise or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth's empowering brew rising in root and branch, the words of a dream of you I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer who feels the solace of his native land under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss that lay before me, but only the level ground.
3
Sometimes our life reminds me of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing and in that opening a house,
an orchard and a garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers red and yellow in the sun, a pattern made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways to be made anew day after day, the dark richer than the light and more blessed provided we stay brave enough to keep on going in.
4
How many times have I come into you out of my
head with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light and all directions. I come to you lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace in you, when I arrive at last.
5
Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange of my love and work for yours, so much for so much of an expendable fund. We don't know what its
limits are —
that puts it in the dark. We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on
discovering we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the
unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown
is always leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a
blessing a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the
light enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I have fallen time and again from the great strength of my desire, helpless, into your arms.
6
What I am learning to give you is my death to set you free of me, and me from myself into the dark and the new light. Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.
7
I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to
dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early
morning.
I give you the life I have let live for love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life that we have planted in this ground, as I have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all beautiful and honest women that you gather to
yourself again and again, and satisfy — and this poem,
no more mine than any man's who has loved a
woman.
Zero
The river steams in the cold.
Above it the streams impend, locked like iron in the frozen hollows. The cold reaches of the sky have leapt onto the ground.
But the wren's at home in the cubic acre of his song.
House and shed and barn stand up around their lives like songs. And I have a persistent music in me,
like water flowing under ice,
that says the warmer days will come, blossom and leaf return again. I live in that,
a flimsy enclosure,
but the song's for singing,
not to dread the end.
The end, anyhow, is always here.
It is the climate we sing in.
A man may ease off into it any time, like a settler,
tired of farming, starting out silently into the woods.
On a day like this we have the end in sight. This is zero,
the elemental poverty of all that was ever born,
in which nothing lives by chance but only by choosing to and by knowing how — and by the excess of desire that rises above the mind, surrounding and hovering like a song.
Prayer after Eating
I have taken in the light that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise of what I eat, in the brief blaze of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.
Her First Calf
Her fate seizes her and brings her down. She's heavy with it. It wrings her. The great weight is heaved out of her. It eases.
She moves into what she has become,
sure in her fate now as a fish free in the current.
She turns to the calf who has broken out of the womb's water and its veil.
He breathes. She licks his wet hair.
He gathers his legs under him and rises. He stands, and his legs wobble. After the months of his pursuit of her, now they meet face to face.
From the beginnings of the world his arrival and her welcome have been prepared. They have always known each other.
Kentucky River Junction
to Ken Kesey & Ken Babbs
Clumsy at first, fitting together the years we have been apart,
and the ways.
But as the night passed and the day came, the first fine morning of April,
it came clear:
the world that has tried us and showed us its joy
was our bond when we said nothing.
And we allowed it to be
with us, the new green shining.
Our lives, half gone,
stay full of laughter.
Free-hearted men have the world for words.
Though we have been apart, we have been together.
* * *
Trying to sleep, I cannot take my mind away.
The bright day shines in my head
like a coin on the bed of a stream.
* * *
You left your welcome.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a
card and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
A Marriage, an Elegy
They lived long, and were faithful to the good in each other.
They suffered as their faith required.
Now their union is consummate in earth, and the earth is their communion. They enter the serene gravity of the rain,
the hill's passage to the sea.
After long striving, perfect ease.
The Arrival
Like a tide it comes in,
wave after wave of foliage and fruit,
the nurtured and the wild,
out of the light to this shore.
In its extravagance we shape the strenuous outline of enough.
A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall
Somehow it has all added up to song —
earth, air, rain and light,
the labor and the heat,
the mortality of the young.
I will go free of other singing, I will go into the silence of my songs, to hear this song clearly.
The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment
I
"... it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state."
— Jefferson, to Reverend James Madison,
October 28, 1785
That is the glimmering vein of our sanity, dividing from us from the start: land under us to steady us when we stood,
free men in the great communion of the free. The vision keeps lighting in my mind, a window on the horizon in the dark.
II
To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart. The world is a holy vision, had we clarity to see it — a clarity that men depend on men to make.
III
It is ignorant money I declare myself free from, money fat and dreaming in its sums, driving us into the streets of absence,
stranding the pasture trees in the deserted language of banks.
IV
And I declare myself free from ignorant love. You easy lovers and forgivers of mankind, stand back!
I will love you at a distance,
and not because you deserve it.
My love must be discriminate or fail to bear its weight.
Planting Trees
In the mating of trees,
the pollen grain entering invisible the domed room of the winds, survives the ghost of the old forest that was here when we came. The ground invites it, and it will not be gone.
I become the familiar of that ghost and its ally, carrying in a bucket twenty trees smaller than weeds,
and I plant them along the way of the departure of the ancient host.
I return to the ground its original music.
It will rise out of the horizon of the grass, and over the heads of the weeds, and it will rise over the horizon of men's heads. As I age in the world it will rise and spread,
and be for this place horizon and orison, the voice of its winds.
I have made myself a dream to dream of its rising, that has gentled my nights.
Let me desire and wish well the life these trees may live when I no longer rise in the mornings to be pleased by the green of them shining, and their shadows on the ground,
and the sound of the wind in them.
The Wild Geese
Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer's end. In time's maze over the fall fields, we name names that went west from here, names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.
The Silence
Though the air is full of singing my head is loud with the labor of words.
Though the season is rich with fruit, my tongue hungers for the sweet of speech.
Though the beech is golden I cannot stand beside it mute, but must say
"It is golden," while the leaves stir and fall with a sound that is not a name.
It is in the silence that my hope is, and my aim.
A song whose lines
I cannot make or sing sounds men's silence like a root. Let me say
and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.
Anger Against Beasts
The hook of adrenaline shoves into the blood. Man's will,
long schooled to kill or have its way, would drive the beast against nature, transcend the impossible in simple fury.
The blow falls like a dead seed.
It is defeat, for beasts do not pardon, but heal or die in the absence of the past.
The blow survives in the man.
His triumph is a wound. Spent,
he must wait the slow unalterable forgiveness of time.
At a Country Funeral
Now the old ways that have brought us farther than we remember sink out of sight as under the treading of many strangers ignorant of landmarks. Only once in a while they are cast clear again upon the mind as at a country funeral where, amid the soft lights and hothouse flowers, the expensive solemnity of experts, notes of a polite musician,
persist the usages of old neighborhood.
Friends and kinsmen come and stand and speak,
knowing the extremity they have come to,
one of their own bearing to the earth the last of his light, his darkness the sun's definitive mark.
They stand and think as they stood and thought when even the gods were different.
And the organ music, though decorous as for somebody else's grief, has its source in the outcry of pain and hope in log churches,
and on naked hillsides by the open grave,
eastward in mountain passes, in tidelands,
and across the sea. How long a time?
Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide my self in Thee. They came, once in time,
in simple loyalty to their dead, and returned to the world. The fields and the work remained to be returned to. Now the entrance of one of the old ones into the Rock too often means a lifework perished from the land without inheritor, and the field goes wild and the house sits and stares. Or it passes at cash value into the hands of strangers.
Now the old dead wait in the open coffin for the blood kin to gather, come home for one last time, to hear old men whose tongues bear an essential topography speak memories doomed to die.
But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,
is one of the land's seeds, as a seed is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,
to pass on into life the knowledge of what has died. What we owe the future is not a new start, for we can only begin with what has happened. We owe the future the past, the long knowledge that is the potency of time to come.
That makes of a man's grave a rich furrow.
The community of knowing in common is the seed of our life in this place. There is not only no better possibility, there is no other, except for chaos and darkness,
the terrible ground of the only possible new start. And so as the old die and the young depart, where shall a man go who keeps the memories of the dead, except home again, as one would go back after a burial,
faithful to the fields, lest the dead die a second and more final death.
The Recognition
You put on my clothes and it was as though we met some other place and I looked and knew you. This is what we keep going through, the lyrical changes, the strangeness in which I know again what I have known before.
Planting Crocuses
1
I made an opening to reach through blind into time, through sleep and silence, to new heat, a new rising,
a yellow flower opening in the sound of bees.
2
Deathly was the giving of that possibility to a motion of the world that would bring it out, bright, in time.
3
My mind pressing in through the earth's dark motion toward bloom, I though of you,
glad there is no escape.
It is this we will be turning and returning to.
Praise
1
Don't think of it.
Vanity is absence.
Be here. Here is the root and stem unappraisable on whose life your life depends.
2
Be here like the water of the hill that fills each opening it comes to, to leave with a sound that is a part of local speech.
The Gathering
At my age my father held me on his arm like a hooded bird,
and his father held him so.
Now I grow into brotherhood with my father as he with his has grown,
time teaching me his thoughts in my own.
Now he speaks in me as when I knew him first,
as his father spoke in him when he had come to thirst for the life of a young son. My son will know me in himself when his son sits hooded on his arm and I have grown to be brother to all my fathers, memory speaking to knowledge,
finally, in my bones.
A Homecoming
One faith is bondage. Two are free. In the trust of old love, cultivation shows a dark graceful wilderness at its heart. Wild in that wilderness, we roam the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds of what we know. O love,
open. Show me my country. Take me home.
Excerpted from "The Country of Marriage"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Amy Sackville.
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
The Old Elm Tree by the River,
Poem,
Breaking,
The Country of Marriage,
Zero,
Prayer after Eating,
Her First Calf,
Kentucky River Junction,
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,
A Marriage, an Elegy,
The Arrival,
A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall,
The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment,
Planting Trees,
The Wild Geese,
The Silence,
Anger Against Beasts,
At a Country Funeral,
The Recognition,
Planting Crocuses,
Praise,
The Gathering,
A Homecoming,
Leaving Home,
The Mad Farmer's Love Song,
The Strangers,
The Cruel Plumage,
Testament,
The Clear Days,
To William Butler Yeats,
Song,
The Asparagus Bed,
Poem for J.,
Inland Passages,
An Anniversary,