Note Details
I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields, and to sing of its passing while it waits.
The farm must be made a form, endlessly bringing together heaven and earth, light and rain building, dissolving, building back again the shapes and actions of the ground.
– Wendell Berry
Alternative
I see how little avail one man is, and yet I would not be a man sitting still, no little song of desire traveling the mind’s dark woods.
I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields …
The farm must be made a form, endlessly bringing together heaven and earth, light and rain building, dissolving, building back again the shapes and actions of the ground.
Full Poem
From the Crest
1.
What we leave behind to sleep
is ahead of us when we awake.
Cleared, the field must be kept clear.
There are more clarities to make.
The farm is an infinite form.
Thinking of what may come,
I wake up in the night
and cannot go back to sleep.
The future swells in the dark,
too large a room
for one man to sleep well in.
I think of the work at hand.
Before spring comes again
there is another pasture to clear and sow,
for an end I desire but cannot know.
Now in the silent keep
of stars and of my work
I lay me down to sleep.
2.
The deepest sleep holds us
to something immutable.
We have fallen into place,
and harmony surrounds us.
We are carried in the world,
in the company of stars.
But as the dawn approaches,
I feel shaping in my belly,
for another day, my hunger,
harder than bone, keener than fire,
and I weave round it again
the kindling tapestry of desire.
3.
My life’s wave is at its crest.
The thought of work becomes a friend
of the thought of rest.
I see how little avail one man is,
and yet I would not be
a man sitting still,
no little song of desire
traveling the mind’s dark woods.
I am trying to teach my mind
to bear the long, slow growth
of the fields, and to sing
of its passing while it waits.
The farm must be made a form,
endlessly bringing together
heaven and earth, light and rain
building, dissolving, building back again
the shapes and actions of the ground.
If it is to be done,
not of the body, not of the will
the strength will come,
but of delight
that moves lovers in their loves,
that moves the sun and stars,
that stirs the leaf, and lifts the hawk in flight.
From the crest of the wave
the grave is in sight,
the soul’s last deep track in the known.
Past there it gives up
roof and fire, board, bed, and word.
It returns to the wild,
where nothing is done by hand.
I am trying to teach my mind
to accept the finish
that all good work must have:
of hands touching me,
days and weathers passing over me,
the smooth of love, the wearing of the earth.
At the final stroke
I will be a finished man.
4.
Little farm, motherland,
made, like an abused wife,
by what has nearly been your ruin,
when I speak to you,
I speak to myself, for we are one body.
When I speak to you,
I speak to wife, daughter, son,
whom you have fleshed in your flesh.
And speaking to you, I speak to all
that brotherhood that rises daily
in your substance and walks, burrows,
flies, stands: plants and beasts
whose lives loop like dolphins
through your sod.
5.
Going into the city, coming home again,
I keep you always in my mind.
Who knows me who does not know you?
The crowds of the streets do not know
that you are passing among them with me.
They think I am simply a man,
made of a job and clothes and education.
They do not see who is with me,
or know the resurrection
by which we have come from the dead.
In the city we must be seemly and quiet
as becomes those who travel among strangers.
But do not on that account believe
that I am ashamed to acknowledge you,
my friend. We will write them a poem
to tell them of the great fellowship,
the mystic order,
to which both of us belong.
6.
When I think of death I see
that you are but a passing thought
poised upon the ground,
held in place by vision, love, and work,
all as passing as a thought.
7.
Beginning and end thread these fields
like a net. Nosing and shouldering,
the field mouse pats his anxious routes
through the grass, the mole his cool ones
among the roots; the air is tensely woven
of bird flight, fluttery at night with bats;
the mind of the honeybee is the map of bloom.
Like a man, the farm is headed for the woods.
The wild is already veined in it
everywhere, its thriving.
To love these things one did not intend
is to be a friend
to the beginning and the end.
8.
And when we speak together, love,
our words rise like leaves,
out of our fallen words.
What we have said becomes an earth
we live on like two trees,
whose sheddings enrich each other,
making both the source of each.
When we love,
the green stalks and downturned bells
of lilies grow from our flesh.
Dreams and visions flower
from these beds our bodies are.
9.
The farm travels in snow,
a little world flying
through the Milky Way.
The flakes all fall into place.
But already the mind begins
to shift its light, clearing space
to receive anew the old fate of spring.
In all the fields and woods,
old work calls to new.
The dead and living
prepare again to mate.
10.
Let the great song come,
that sways the branches,
that weaves the nest of the vireo,
that the ground squirrel dreams
in his deep sleep, and wakes,
that the fish hear, that pipes
the minnows over the shoals.
In snow I wait and sing
of the braided song
I only partly hear.
Even in the rising year,
even in the spring,
the little can hope to sing
only in praise of the great.