The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry

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СКАЧАТЬ The forked

      trunk and branches are

      also a kind of necessary

      prose—shingled with leaves,

      pigment and song

      imposed on the blunt

      lineaments of fact, a foliage

      of small birds among them.

      The tree lifts itself up

      in the garden, the

      clutter of its green

      leaves halving the light,

      stating the unalterable

      congruity and form

      of its casual growth;

      the crimson finches appear

      and disappear, singing

      among the design.

THE WILD

      In the empty lot—a place

      not natural, but wild—among

      the trash of human absence,

      the slough and shamble

      of the city’s seasons, a few

      old locusts bloom.

      A few woods birds

      fly and sing

      in the new foliage

      —warblers and tanagers, birds

      wild as leaves; in a million

      each one would be rare,

      new to the eyes. A man

      couldn’t make a habit

      of such color,

      such flight and singing.

      But they are the habit of this

      wasted place. In them

      the ground is wise. They are

      its remembrance of what it is.

THE PLAN

      My old friend, the owner

      of a new boat, stops by

      to ask me to fish with him,

      and I say I will—both of us

      knowing that we may never

      get around to it, it may be

      years before we’re both

      idle again on the same day.

      But we make a plan, anyhow,

      in honor of friendship

      and the fine spring weather

      and the new boat

      and our sudden thought

      of the water shining

      under the morning fog.

THE BROKEN GROUND

      The opening out and out,

      body yielding 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:

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