Читать книгу The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry - Wendell Berry - Страница 9

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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:

the Queen Anne’s lace

—gobletted,

green beginning to bloom,

tufted, upfurling—

unfolding

whiteness:

in this winter’s memory

more clear than ever in summer,

cold paring away excess:

the single blooming random

in the summer’s abundance

of its kind, in high relief

above the clover and grass

of the field, unstill

an instant,

the day having come upon it,

green and white

in as much light as ever was.

Opened, white, at the solstice

of its becoming, then the flower

forgets its growing;

is still;

dirt is its paradigm—

and this memory’s seeing,

a cold wind keening the outline.

3.

Winter nights the house sleeps,

a dry seedhead in the snow

falling and fallen, the white

and dark and depth of it, continuing

slow impact of silence.

The dark

rooms hold our heads on pillows, waiting

day, through the snow falling and fallen

in the darkness between inconsecutive

dreams. The brain burrows in its earth

and sleeps,

trusting dawn, though the sun’s

light is a light without precedent, never

proved ahead of its coming, waited for

by the law that hope has made it.

4.

What do you intend?

Drink blood

and speak, old ghosts. I don’t

hear you. What has it amounted to

—the unnegotiable accumulation

of your tears? Your expenditure

has purchased no reprieve. Your

failed wisdom shards among the

down-going atoms of the moment.

History goes blind and in darkness,

neither sees nor is seen, nor is

known except as a carrion

marked with unintelligible wounds;

dragging its dead body, living,

yet to be born, it moves heavily

to its glories. It tramples

the little towns, forgets their names.

5.

If reason were all, reason

would not exist—the will

to reason accounts for it;

it’s not reason that chooses

to live; the seed doesn’t swell

in its husk by reason, but loves

itself, obeys light which is

its own thought and argues the leaf

in secret; love articulates

the choice of life in fact; life

chooses life because it is

alive; what lives didn’t begin dead,

nor sun’s fire commence in ember.

Love foresees a jointure

composing a house, a marriage

of contraries, compendium

of opposites in equilibrium.

This morning the sun

came up before the moon set;

shadows were stripped from the house

like burnt rags, the sky turning

blue behind the clear moon,

day and night moving to day.

Let severances be as dividing

budleaves around the flower

—woman and child enfolded, chosen.

It’s a dying begun, not lightly,

the taking up of this love

whose legacy is its death.

6.

This is a love poem for you, Tanya—

among wars, among the brutal forfeitures

of time, in this house, among its latent fires,

among all that honesty must see, I accept

your dying, and love you: nothing mitigates

—and for our Mary, chosen by the blind

hungering of our blood, precious and periled

in her happy mornings; whose tears are mine.

7.

There’s still a degree of sleep

recalls

the vast empty dream I slept in

as a child

sometimes contained a chaos, tangled

like fishline snarled in hooks—

sometimes a hook, whetted, severe,

drawing

the barbed darkness to a point;

sometimes I seemed merely to be falling.

The house, also, has taken shape in it.

8.

And l have dreamed

of the morning coming in

like a bird through the window

not burdened by a thought,

the light a singing

as I hoped.

It comes in and sings

on the corner of the white washstand,

among coleus stems and roots

in a clear green bottle

on the black tabletop

beneath the window,

under the purple coleus leaves,

among spearing

green philodendron leaves,

on the white washstand:

a small yellow bird with black wings,

darting in and out.

9.

To imagine the thoughtlessness

of a thoughtless thing

is useless.

The mind must sing

of itself to keep awake.

Love has visualized a house,

and out of its expenditure.

fleshed the design

at this cross ways

of consciousness and time:

its form is growth

come to light in it;

croplands, gardens,

are of its architecture,

labor its realization;

solstice is the height

of its consciousness,

thicket a figuration

of its waking;

plants and stars are made convergent

in its windows;

cities we have gone to and come back

are the prospect of its doorways.

And there’s a city it dreams of:

salt-white beside the water.

10.

Waking comes into sleep like a dream:

violet dawn over the snow, the black trees.

Snow and the house’s white make a white

the black swifts may come back to.

THREE ELEGIAC POEMS

Harry Erdman Perry, 1881-1965

I

Let him escape hospital and doctor,

the manners and odors of strange places,

the dispassionate skills of experts.

Let him go free of tubes and needles,

public corridors, the surgical white

of life dwindled to poor pain.

Foreseeing the possibility of life without

possibility of joy, let him give it up.

Let him die in one of the old rooms

of his living, no stranger near him.

Let him go in peace out of the bodies

of his life—

flesh and marriage and household.

From the wide vision of his own windows

let him go out of sight; and the final

time and light of his life’s place be

last seen before his eyes’ slow

opening in the earth.

Let him go like one familiar with the way

into the wooded and tracked and

furrowed hill, his body.

II

I stand at the cistern in front of the old barn

in the darkness, in the dead of winter,

the night strangely warm, the wind blowing,

rattling an unlatched door.

I draw the cold water up out of the ground, and drink.

At the house the light is still waiting.

An old man I have loved all my life is dying

in his bed there. He is going

slowly down from himself.

In final obedience to his life, he follows

his body out of our knowing.

Only his hands, quiet on the sheet, keep

a painful resemblance to what they no longer are.

III

He goes free of the earth.

The sun of his last day sets

clear in the sweetness of his liberty.

The earth recovers from his dying,

the hallow of his life remaining

in all his death leaves.

Radiances know him. Grown lighter

than breath, he is set free

in our remembering. Grown brighter

than vision, he goes dark

into the life of the hill

that holds his peace.

He is hidden among all that is,

and cannot be lost.