The clearing rests in song and shade.
It is a creature made
By old light held in soil and leaf,
By human joy and grief,
By human work,
Fidelity of sight and stroke,
By rain, by water on
The parent stone.We join our work to Heaven’s gift,
Our hope to what is left,
That field and woods at last agree
In an economy
Of widest worth.
High Heaven’s Kingdom come on earth.
Imagine Paradise.
O Dust, arise!
He’s certain where he’s headed it’s too late.
West Broadway glitters in a mist of rain
that amber cones of light elucidate.
He’s certain. Where he’s headed, it’s too late
to stop for flowers, dry off, or get things straight:
a story, his misshapen hat, his brain.
He’s certain where he’s headed. It’s too late.
West Broadway glitters in a mist of rain.
N.B. An example of a “triolet,” a form that’s not much in vogue these days (if ever). But I think this is an excellent, sad poem. I especially appreciate how the repeated first line changes meaning simply through varying punctuation.
Sabbaths 1979 | Wendell Berry
V
How many have relinquished
Breath, in grief or rage,
The victor and the vanquished
Named on the bitter pageAlike, or indifferently
Forgot–all that they did
Undone entirely.
The dust they stirred has hidTheir 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.
There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning, in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each morning, in the spoon and the chair that cry "hello there, Anne" each morning, in the godhead of the table that I set my silver, plate, cup upon each morning. All this is God, right here in my pea-green house each morning and I mean, though often forget, to give thanks, to faint down by the kitchen table in a prayer of rejoicing as the holy birds at the kitchen window peck into their marriage of seeds. So while I think of it, let me paint a thank-you on my palm for this God, this laughter of the morning, lest it go unspoken. The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard, dies young.
I’m hopeful that
to save its own species,
the tiger will become a poet,
the way dinosaurs became lizards,
And the poet, occasionally, a tiger
In the coffee shop,
I saw a customer reading a big thick book,
It looked serious, printed on heavy paper, hardback with a jacket.
I tried to see the title, but he packed up
Before I got a look. Now I’ll never know.
A woman sat in the same seat after him.
She also brought a book. This one,
I could see the title.
Comfortable With Uncertainty.
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat, Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass. Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns. My mother shades her eyes and looks my way Over the drifted stream. My father spins A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank. I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is! Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
… the stars shone in their watches, and were glad;
he called them, and they said, ‘Here we are!’
They shone with gladness for him who made them.
Fall is. It always comes round, with its lovely patience. If in the beginning it’s restless, at the end it’s resigned, complete in its waiting, complete in the utter correctness of what it has to tell us. Which is that we’re transitory.
Joy Wiilliams, via Austin Kleon
Mono no aware
Malcolm Guite:
Come close with Mary, Martha, Lazarus So close the candles flare with their soft breath And kindle heart and soul to flame within us Lit by these mysteries of life and death. For beauty now begins the final movement In quietness and intimate encounter The alabaster jar of precious ointment Is broken open for the world’s true lover, The whole room richly fills to feast the senses With all the yearning such a fragrance brings, The heart is mourning but the spirit dances, Here at the very centre of all things, Here at the meeting place of love and loss We all foresee, and see beyond the cross.
In recent decades it has become customary, and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight, to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon.
What I myself seem to damn mainly though, is just not having seen it. Without any virtuous hindsight I would likely have helped in the ravaging, as did even most of those who loved it best.
But God! To have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had; and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine, and call at night in the sky.
Often, a highlight of my week is a new (to me) poem shared by Pádraig Ó Tuama. Today’s, “Neanderthal Dig” by Don McKay, is especially rich.
Robert Herrick:
The darling of the world is come,
And, fit it is, we find a room
To welcome Him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart …
Merry Christmas!
In the tender compassion of our God
the dawn from on high will break upon us
To shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death,
and to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Malcolm Guite is posting poems he’s collected in his Advent Anthology, Waiting on the Word. I love to hear Malcolm read (and speak). Today’s offerings, a poem by Robert Hayden, and art by Linda Richardson, are particularly lovely.
Well, I woke up Sunday morning With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad So I had one more for dessert Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes And found my cleanest dirty shirt And I shaved my face and combed my hair And stumbled down the stairs to meet the day I'd smoked my brain the night before On cigarettes and songs that I'd been pickin' But I lit my first and watched a small kid Cussin' at a can that he was kickin' Then I crossed the empty street And caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken And it took me back to somethin' That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way On a Sunday morning sidewalk Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned Cause there's something in a Sunday That makes a body feel alone And there's nothin' short of dyin' Half as lonesome as the sound As a sleepin' city sidewalk Sunday mornin' comin' down In the park, I saw a daddy With a laughing little girl who he was swingin' And I stopped beside a Sunday school And listened to the song that they were singin' Then I headed back for home And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin' And it echoed through the canyons Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday On a Sunday morning sidewalk Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned Cause there's something in a Sunday Makes a body feel alone And there's nothin' short of dyin' Half as lonesome as the sound As a sleepin' city sidewalk Sunday mornin' comin' down
Sad memorial in the NYT. I loved liverwurst on rye with mustard and red onion slices from the late ’70s Stanford Coffee House. I still wonder why people crossed to the other side of the street after I’d enjoyed one.
At Zabar’s, 1970 - Credit: Michael Gold/Getty Image
Will you, sometime, who have sought so long, and seek
Still in the slowly darkening searching-ground,
Catch sight some ordinary month or week
Of that rare prize you hardly thought you sought—
The gatherer gathered and the finder found,
The buyer who would buy all himself well bought—
And perch in pride in the buyer’s hand, at home,
And there, the prize, in freedom rest and roam?
When I first sat with Wendell [Berry] to talk about educating farmers as farmers, he started by turning to the idea of love—in the fullness of the term, not sentimentalized but fully rounded, with the joyful and the difficult joined through membership in a place and with its people.
He then asked a question that I try to answer every day: what works does this love propose?
Start with love, then see what works that love proposes. (H/T: @ayjay)
Jesus, my brother, Jesus, my maker, Today, you paid my bills. What can I do, but fall on my face, And thank you for your grace? Jesus, my Lord.
I’m really enjoying this audiobook of The Odyssey read by the actor, Anton Lesser. The translation by Ian Johnston is very accessible (if a bit awkward at times). I think this story has legs. 📚
It’s nineteen years today since he last held
A drink in his hand or held his breath while smoke
Filled as much of him as he could stand
Til, letting it out, he sought oblivion
Of the trace of memory or anticipation,
And his life fell into a death spiral. Since then
He’s been around folks like him. When he’s been asked,
And sometimes, eager, when he hasn’t been,
He talks to the ones who are not even sure
They want to learn how to stop killing themselves.
That feeling still seems close to him some days.
Right now he’s okay, and that’s enough, right now.
RIP, Ken. You were important in my life.
Wet things smell stronger, and I suppose his main regret is that he can sniff just one at a time. In a frenzy of delight he runs way up the sandy road— scored by freshets after five days of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf. When I whistle he halts abruptly and steps in a circle, swings his extravagant tail. The he rolls and rubs his muzzle in a particular place, while the drizzle falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace and Goldenrod bend low. The top of the logging road stands open and light. Another day, before hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes, leaving word first at home. The footing is ambiguous. Soaked and muddy, the dog drops, panting, and looks up with what amounts to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him, nicely winded, and looking down on the pond. A sound commences in my left ear like the sound of the sea in a shell; a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it. Time to head home. I wait until we’re nearly out to the main road to put him back on the leash, and he —the designated optimist— imagines to the end that he is free.
Tragedy and Christianity are incommensurable,
he declared, which we’d have chalked to bluster
had he not, within the month, held a son
hot from the womb but cold to his kiss,
and over a coffin compact as a toolbox wept
in the wrecked unreachable way that most resist,
and that all of us, where we are most ourselves,
turn away from.
Bonded and islanded
by the silence, we waited there,
desperate, with our own pains, to believe,
desperate, with our own pains, not to.
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn’t tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.