Collected Sabbath Poems & New, 1979-2013,
Wendell Berry
1985 (the first and last stanza) FOR: MEL
Not again in this flesh will I see
the old trees stand as they did,
weighty creatures made of light, delight
of their making straight in them and well,
whatever blight our blindness was or made,
however thought or act might fail.
Though blindness may yet detonate in light,
ruining all, after all the years, great right
subsumed at last in paltry wrong,
what do we know? Still
the Presence that we come into with song
is here, shaping the seasons of His wild will.
played with lines and squiggles instead of words.
April has been everything it can be. I found Wendell Berry someplace in my precious library, and I just love his old American way of hanging on to Transcendendtalism long after the cultural was fashion in America, at its best of years. But, by 1985 Berry saw the evolution of humanity trying to keep up with the evolution of Corporate Capitalism. A new guilded age was being ushered-in by the Tea-Party, twenty-five years later it is inevitable: the corn fields and the wheat fields are turning into sub-urban malls designed to have a short life, left to decay. Not like you, or i, or an old barn returning from Dust to Dust, rather, like steal beams rusting into asbestos and cement seaping through the tar and dripping with toxic paints.
Please Wabi-Saii show me the beauty in this decay. I want to see it. I want to touch it and feel it the way I did when I was ten.
I saw that boy recently. He was four years old. He was gifted to me by a spirit guide named Mel. All I know about her is her given name, Mel. She narrated me down a rabit hole and I fell into my inner landscape, I love it it ther. He was so small, just walking down the side porch stairs leading to a gravel yard (stone, screws, nails and glass) a car park area for the Canadian Style triple-decker that is iconic of the early 20th century.
He was wearing a three-quarter herringbone coat with a matching herringbone hat with a very small visor and, also of herringbone button smack on top of his hat. He was heading toward his friends house and I saw his face light up with a glow when he saw him come down the steps that led from his house to the dirt road between them. .
We played in the, Italian Field, among oily street run-off water, the rag-weed and the golden-rods. I remember a bow and arrow, and the arrows had rubber suction cups and you knew you could not possibly hurt yourself or your friend. It was all so safe and innocent.
Then I opened my eyes back into the outer-landscape. I like it in both places.
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