wendellberry

wendellberry

song

Within the circles of our liveswe dance the circles of the years,

the circles of the seasonswithin the circles of the years,

the cycles of the moonwithin the circles of the seasons,

the circles of our reasons within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,changed, changing. Hands

join, unjoin in love and fear,grief and joy. The circles turn,each giving into each, into all.

Only music keeps us here,each by all the others held.

In the hold of hands and eyeswe turn in pairs, that joining

joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

awake atnight

Late in the night I payThe unrest I owe

To the life that has never livedAnd cannot live now.

What the world could beIs my good dream

And my agony when, dreaming it,I lie awake and turn

And look into the dark.I think of a luxury,

In the sturdiness and graceOf necessary things, not

In frivolity. That would healThe earth, and heal men.But the end, too, is partOf the pattern, the last

Labor of the heart:To learn to lie stillOne with the earth

Again, and let the world go.

thefamiliar

The hand is risen from the earth,the sap risen, leaf come back to branch,

bird to nest crotch. Beans lifttheir heads up in the row. The known

returns to be known again. Goingand coming back, it forms its curves,a nerved ghostly anatomy in the air.

Art had a compound mind, as a daisy has a compound flower.

The health of the oceans depends on the health of rivers; the health of rivers depends on the health of small streams; the health of small streams depends on the health of their watersheds. The health of the water is exactly the same as the health of the land; the health of small places is exactly the same as the health of large places. As we know, disease is hard to confine. Because natural law is in force everywhere, infections move.

We cannot immunize the continents and the oceans against our contempt for small places and small streams. Small destructions add up, and finally they are understood as parts of large destructions. Excessive nutrient runoff from farms and animal factories in the Mississippi watershed has caused, in the Gulf of Mexico, a hypoxic dead zone of 5,000 to 6,000 square miles. In 40-odd years, strip mining in the Appalachian coal fields, culminating in mountain removal, has gone far toward the destruction of a whole region, with untold damage to the region’s people, to watersheds, and to the waters downstream.

There is not a more exemplary history of our contempt for small places than that of eastern Kentucky coal mining, which has enriched many absentee corporate shareholders and left the region impoverished and defaced. Coal industry representatives are now defending mountain

removal” and its attendant damage to forests, streams, wells, dwellings, roads and community life” by saying that in “10, 15, 20 years” the land will be restored, and that such mining has “created” the level land needed for further industrial development.

But when you remove a mountain you also remove the topsoil and the forest, and you do immeasurable violence to the ecosystem and the watershed. These things are not to be restored in 10 or 20 years, or in 10 or 20 hundred years. As for the manufacture of level places for industrial development, the supply has already far exceeded any foreseeable demand. And the devastation continues.

The contradictions in the state’s effort “to balance the competing interests” were stated as follows by Ewell Balltrip, director of the Kentucky Appalachian Commission: “If you don’t have mining, you don’t have an economy, and if you don’t have an economy you don’t have a way for the people to live. But if you don’t have environmental quality, you won’t create the kind of place where people want to live.”

Yes. And if the clearly foreseeable result is a region of flat industrial sites where nobody wants to live, we need a better economy.

small destructions add up

But when you remove a mountain you also remove the topsoil and the forest, and you do immeasurable violence to the ecosystem and the watershed.

In the great circle, dancing inand out of time, you move now

toward your partners, answeringthe music suddenly audible to you

that only carried you beforeand will carry you again.

When you meet the destined onesnow dancing toward you,

we will be in line behind you,

out of your awareness for the time,we whom you know, others we remember

whom you do not remember, othersforgotten by us all.

When you meet, and hold lovein your arms, regardless of all,

the unknown will dance away from youtoward the horizon of light.

Our names will flutteron these hills like little fires.

our children, coming of age

our children, coming of age

prayers and sayings of the mad farmer

I. It is presumptuous and irresponsible to pray for other people. A good man would pray only for himself – that he have as much good as he deserves, that he not receive more good or evil than he deserves, that he bother nobody, that he not be bothered, that he want less. Praying thus for himself, he should prepare to live with the consequences.

II. At night make me one with the darkness. In the morning make me one with the light.

III. If a man finds it necessary to eat garbage, he should resist the tempta-tion to call it a delicacy.

IV. Don’t pray for the rain to stop. Pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.

V. Don’t own so much clutter than you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.

VI. Beware of the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the de-cent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.VII. Put your hands into the mire. They will learn the kinship of the shaped and the unshapen, the living and the dead.

VIII. When I rise up let me rise up joyful, like a bird. When I fall let me fall without regret, like a leaf.

IX. Sowing the seed, my hand is one with the earth. Wanting the seed to grow, my mind is one with the light. Hoeing the crop, my hands are one with the rain. Having cared for the plants, my mind is one with the air. Hun-gry and trusting, my mind is one with the earth. Eating the fruit, my body is one with the earth.

X. Let my marriage be brought to the ground. Let my love for this woman enrich the earth. What is its happiness but preparing its place? What is its monument but a rich field?XI. By the excellence of his work the workman is a neighbor. By selling only what he would not despise to own, the salesman is a neighbor. By selling what is good his character survives his market.

XII. Let me wake in the night and hear it raining and go back to sleep.

XIII. Don’t worry and fret about the crops. After you have done all you can for them, let them stand in the weather on their own. If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed. But the real products of a year’s work are the farmer’s mind and the cropland itself. If he raises a good crop at the cost of belittling himself or diminish-ing the ground, he has gained nothing. He will have to begin over again the next spring, worse off than before. Let him receive the season’s increment into his mind. Let him work it into the soil. The finest growth that farmland can produce is a careful farmer.

Make the human race a better head. Make the world a better ground.

When I rise up let me rise up joyful, like a bird. When I fall let me fall without regret,

like a leaf.

are you alright?“It’s awful the things that can get into your mind,” Elton said. “I’d hate it if anything was to happen to them.”

Elton worked hard and worried hard, and he was often in need of rest. But he had a restless mind, which meant that he could not rest on his own place in the presence of his own work. If he rested there, first he would begin to think about what he had to do, and then he would begin to do it.

Art was the rememberer. He knew what he knew and what had been known by a lot of dead kinfolks and neighbors. They lived on in his mind and spoke there, reminding him and us of things that needed to be remembered. Art had a compound mind, as a daisy has a compound flower, and his mind had something of the unwary comeliness of a daisy. Something that happened would remind him of something that he remembered, which would remind him of something that his grandfather remembered. It was not that he “lived in his mind.” He lived in the place, but the place was where the memories were, and he walked among them, tracing them out over the living ground. That was why we loved him.We followed the state road along the ridges toward Port William and then at the edge of town turned down the Sand Ripple Road. We went down the hill through the woods, and as we came near the floor of the valley, Elton went more carefully and we began to watch. We crossed a little board culvert that rattled under the wheels, eased around a bend, and there was the backwater, the headlights glancing off it into the treetops, the road disappearing into it.

Elton stopped the truck. He turned off his headlights and the engine, and the quietness of the moonlight and the woods came down around us. It was not only that we could not go where we were used to going; it was as if a thought that we were used to thinking could not be thought.

Being in the woods at night excited him. He was a hunter. And we were excited by the flood’s interruption of the road. The rising of the wild water had moved us back in time.

Once we had climbed the bank and stepped over the fence and were walking among the big trees, we seemed already miles from the truck. The water gleamed over the bottomlands below us on our right; you could not see that there had ever been a road in that place. I followed Elton along the slope through the trees. Neither of us thought to use a flashlight, though we each had one, nor did we talk. The moon gave plenty of light. We could see everything-underfoot the blooms of twinleaf, bloodroot, rue anemone, the little stars of spring beauties, and overhead the littlest branches, even the blooms on the sugar maples. The ground was soft from the rain, and we hardly made a sound. The flowers around us seemed to float in the shadows so that we walked like waders among stars, uncertain how far down to put our feet. And over the broad shine of the backwater, the calling of the peepers rose like another flood, higher than the water flood, and thrilled and trembled in the air.

It was a long walk because we had to go around the inlets of the backwater that lay in every swag and hollow. Way off, now and again, we could hear the owls. Once we startled a deer and stood still while it plunged away into the shadows. They collected their little share of light and gave it back. Now and then, when we came to an especially thick patch of them, Elton would point. Or he would raise his hand and we would stop a minute and listen to the owls.

I was wider awake than I had been since morning would have been glad to go on walking all night long. Around us we could feel the year coming, as strong and wide and irresistible as a wind.

are you alright?But we were thinking, too, of the Rowanberrys. That we were in a mood to loiter and did not loiter would have reminded us of them, if we had needed reminding. To go to their house, with the water up, would have required a long walk from any place we could have started. We were taking the shortest way, which left us with the problem that it was going to be a little too short. The best we could do, this way, would be to come down the valley until we would be across from the house but still divided from it by a quarter mile or more of backwater. We could call to them from there. But what if we got no answer? What if the answer was trouble? Well, they had a boat over there. If they needed us, one of them could set us over in the boat. But what if we got no answer? What if, to put the best construction upon silence, they could not hear us? Well, we could only go as near as we could get and call.

So if our walk had the feeling of a ramble, it was not one. We were going as straight to the Rowanberrys’ house as the water and the lay of the land would allow. After a while we began to expect to see a light. And then we began to wonder if there was a light to see. Elton stopped. “I thought we’d have seen their light by now.”

I said, “They’re probably asleep.”

Those were the first words we had spoken since we left the truck. After so long, in so much quiet, our voices sounded small.

Elton went on among the trees and the shadows, and I followed him. We climbed over a little shoulder of the slope then and saw one window shining. It was the light of an oil lamp, so their electricity was out, too.

“And now we’re found,” Elton said. He sang it, just that much of the old hymn, almost in a whisper.

We went through a little more of the woods and climbed the fence into the Rowanberrys’ hill pasture. We could see their big barn standing up black now against the moonlight on the other side of the road, which was on high ground at that place, clear of the backwater. We walked side by side, Elton in one wheel track, I in the other, until the road went under the water again. We were as close to the house then as we could get without a boat. We stopped and considered the distance.

And then Elton cupped his hands around his mouth, and called, “Ohhhhh, Mart! Ohhhhh, Art!”

We waited, it seemed, while Art had time to say, “Did you hear somebody?” and Mart to answer, “Well, I thought so.” We saw light come to another window, as somebody picked up a lamp and opened the hall door. We heard the front door open. And then Art’s voice came across the water: “Yeeeaaah?”

And Elton called back, “Are you aaallI riiight?”

I knew they were. They were all right, and we were free to go back through the woods and home to sleep.

But now I know that it was neither of the Rowanberrys who was under the sign of mortality that night. It was Elton. Before another April came he would be in his grave on the hill at Port William. Old Art Rowanberry, who had held him on his lap, would survive him by a dozen years.

And now that both of them are dead, I love to think of them standing with the shining backwater between them, while Elton’s voice goes out across the distance, is heard and answered, and the other voice travels back: “Yeeeaaah!”

I thought we’d have seen their light by now.

Bibliography

Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992

Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982. New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987

Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005

poems and essays written by wendell berrydesigned and assembled by alana rosenbergprinted on 80lb strathmore drawing papermeta and bodoni were used