Cover

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

‘A farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts,’ WENDELL BERRY is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction and essays. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, and also the T. S. Eliot Award, the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement and the National Humanities Medal. For more than forty years, he has lived and farmed in his native Henry Country, Kentucky, with his wife, Tanya, and their children and grandchildren.

THE BROKEN GROUND

The Apple Tree

In the essential prose

of things, the apple tree

stands up, emphatic

among the accidents

of the afternoon, solvent,

not to be denied.

The grass has been cut

down, carefully

to leave the orange

poppies still in bloom;

the tree stands up

in the odor of the grass

drying. 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.

An Architecture

Like a clear room, the clear stanza

of birdsong opens among the noises

of motors and breakfasts.

Among the light’s beginnings,

lifting broken gray of the night’s

end, the bird hastens to his song

as to a place, a room commenced

at the end of sleep. Around

him his singing is entire.

Canticle

for Robert Hazel

What death means is not this –

the spirit, triumphant in the body’s fall,

praising its absence, feeding on music.

If life can’t justify and explain itself,

death can’t justify and explain it.

A creed and a grave never did equal the life

of anything. Yellow flowers sprout in the clefts

of ancient stones at the beginning of April.

The black clothes of the priests are turned

against the frail yellow of sunlight and petal;

they wait in their blackness to earn joy

by dying. They trust that nothing holy is free,

and so their lives are paid. Money slots

in the altar rails make a jukebox of the world,

the mind paying its gnawed coins for the safety of ignorance.

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’re the habit of this

wasted place. In them

the ground is wise. They are

its remembrance of what is.

The Fear of Darkness

The tall marigolds darken.

The baby cries

for better reasons than it knows.

The young wife walks

and walks among the shadows

meshed in the rooms.

And he sits in the doorway,

looking toward the woods,

long after the stars come out.

He feels the slow

sky turn toward him, and wait.

His birthright

is a third-hand Chevrolet,

bought for too much. ‘I

floorboard the son of a bitch,

and let her go.’

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:

and 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.

OPENINGS

The Thought of Something Else

1.

A spring wind blowing

the smell of the ground

through the intersections of traffic,

the mind turns, seeks a new

nativity – another place,

simpler, less weighted

by what has already been.

Another place!

it’s enough to grieve me –

that old dream of going,

of becoming a better man

just by getting up and going

to a better place.

2.

The mystery. The old

unaccountable unfolding.

The iron trees in the park

suddenly remember forests.

It becomes possible to think of going.

3.

– a place where thought

can take its shape

as quietly in the mind

as water in a pitcher,

or a man can be

safely without thought

– see the day begin

and lean back,

a simple wakefulness filling

perfectly

the spaces among the leaves.

To My Children, Fearing for Them

Terrors are to come. The earth

is poisoned with narrow lives.

I think of you. What you will

live through, or perish by, eats

at my heart. What have I done? I

need better answers than there are

to the pain of coming to see

what was done in blindness,

loving what I cannot save. Nor,

your eyes turning toward me,

can I wish your lives unmade

though the pain of them is on me.

March Snow

The morning lights

whiteness that has touched the world

perfectly as air.

In the whitened country

under the still fall of the snow

only the river, like a brown earth,

taking all falling darkly

into itself, moves.

The Finches

The ears stung with cold

sun and frost of dawn

in early April, comes

the song of winter finches,

their crimson bright, then

dark as they move into

and then against the light.

May the year warm them

soon. May they soon go

north with their singing

and the season follow.

May the bare sticks soon

live, and our minds go free

of the ground

into the shining of trees.

The Porch Over the River

In the dusk of the river, the wind

gone, the trees grow still –

the beautiful poise of lightness,

the heavy world pushing toward it.

Beyond, on the face of the water,

lies the reflection of another tree,

inverted, pulsing with the short strokes

of waves the wind has stopped driving.

In a time when men no longer

can imagine the lives of their sons

this is still the world –

the world of my time, the grind

of engines marking the country

like an audible map, the high dark

marked by the flight of men,

lights stranger than stars.

The phoebes cross and re-cross

the openings, alert

for what may still be earned

from the light. The whippoorwills

begin, and the frogs. And the dark

falls again, as it must.

The look of the world withdraws

into the vein of memory.

The mirrored tree, darkening, stirs

with the water’s inward life. What has

made it so? – a quietness in it

no question can be asked in.

The Sycamore

for Henry Caudill

In the place that is my own place, whose earth

I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,

a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.

Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,

hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.

There is no year it has flourished in

that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it

that is its death, though its living brims whitely

at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.

Over all its scars has come the seamless white

of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history

healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection

in the warp and bending of its long growth.

It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.

It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.

In all the country there is no other like it.

I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling

the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.

I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,

and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

The Dream

I dream an inescapable dream

in which I take away from the country

the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,

ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,

our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.

I restore then the wide-branching trees.

I see growing over the land and shading it

the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.

I am aware of the rattling of their branches,

the lichened channels of their bark, the saps

of the ground flowing upward to their darkness.

Like the afterimage of a light that only by not

looking can be seen, I glimpse the country as it was.

All its beings belong wholly to it. They flourish

in dying as in being born. It is the life of its deaths.

I must end, always, by replacing

our beginning there, ourselves and our blades,

the flowing in of history, putting back what I took away,

trying always with the same pain of foreknowledge

to build all that we have built, but destroy nothing.

My hands weakening, I feel on all sides blindness

growing in the land on its peering bulbous stalks.

I see that my mind is not good enough.

I see that I am eager to own the earth and to own men.

I find in my mouth a bitter taste of money,

a gaping syllable I can neither swallow nor spit out.

I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all

that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever.

Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?

The Meadow

In the town’s graveyard the oldest plot now frees itself

of sorrow, the myrtle of the graves grown wild. The last

who knew the faces who had these names are dead,

and now the names fade, dumb on the stones, wild

as shadows in the grass, clear to the rabbit and the wren.

Ungrieved, the town’s ancestry fits the earth. They become

a meadow, their alien marble grown native as maple.

Against the War in Vietnam

Believe the automatic righteousness

of whoever holds office. Believe

the officials who see without doubt

that peace is assured by war, freedom

by oppression. The truth preserved by lying

becomes a lie. Believe or die.

In the name of ourselves we ride

at the wheels of our engines,

in the name of Plenty devouring all,

the exhaust of our progress falling

deadly on villages and fields

we do not see. We are prepared

for millions of little deaths.

Where are the quiet plenteous dwellings

we were coming to, the neighborly dwellings?

We see the American freedom defended

with lies, and the lies defended

with blood, the vision of Jefferson

served by the agony of children,

women cowering in holes.

In Memory: Stuart Egnal

A high wooded hill near Florence, an April

afternoon. Below, the valley farms

were still and small, stall and field

hushed in brightness. Around us the woods

woke with sound, and shadows lived

in the air and on the dry leaves. You

were drawing what we saw. Its forms

and lights reached slowly to your page.

We talked, and laughed at what we said.

Fine hours. The sort men dream

of having, and of having had. Today

while I slept I saw it all

again, and words for you came to me

as though we sat there talking still

in the quick of April. A wakening

strangeness – here in another valley

you never lived to come to – half

a dialogue, keeping on.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The Want of Peace

All goes back to the earth,

and so I do not desire

pride of excess or power,

but the contentments made

by men who have had little:

the fisherman’s silence

receiving the river’s grace,

the gardner’s musing on rows.

I lack the peace of simple things.

I am never wholly in place.

I find no peace or grace.

We sell the world to buy fire,

our way lighted by burning men,

and that has bent my mind

and made me think of darkness

and wish for the dumb life of roots.

Do Not Be Ashamed

You will be walking some night

in the comfortable dark of your yard

and suddenly a great light will shine

round about you, and behind you

will be a wall you never saw before.

It will be clear to you suddenly

that you were about to escape,

and that you are guilty: you misread

the complex instructions, you are not

a member, you lost your card

or never had one. And you will know

that they have been there all along,

their eyes on your letters and books,

their hands in your pockets,

their ears wired to your bed.

Though you have done nothing shameful,

they will want you to be ashamed.

They will want you to kneel and weep

and say you should have been like them.

And once you say you are shamed,

reading the page they hold out to you,

then such light as you have made

in your history will leave you.

They will no longer need to pursue you.

You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.

They will not forgive you.

There is no power against them.

It is only candor that is aloof from them,

only an inward clarity, unashamed,

that they cannot reach. Be ready.

When their light has picked you out

and their questions are asked, say to them:

‘I am not ashamed.’ A sure horizon

will come around you. The heron will begin

his evening flight from the hilltop.

To a Siberian Woodsman

(after looking at some pictures in a magazine)

1.

You lean at ease in your warm house at night after supper,

listening to your daughter play the accordion. You smile

with the pleasure of a man confident in his hands, resting

after a day of long labor in the forest, the cry of the saw

in your head, and the vision of coming home to rest.

Your daughter’s face is clear in the joy of hearing

her own music. Her fingers live on the keys

like people familiar with the land they were born in.

You sit at the dinner table late into the night with your son,

tying the bright flies that will lead you along the forest streams.

Over you, as your hands work, is the dream of the still pools.

Over you is the dream

of your silence while the east brightens, birds waking close by

you in the trees.

2.

I have thought of you stepping out of your doorway at dawn,

your son in your tracks.

You go in under the overarching green branches of the forest

whose ways, strange to me, are well known to you as the sound

of your own voice

or the silence that lies around you now that you have ceased to

speak,

and soon the voice of the stream rises ahead of you, and you

take the path beside it.

I have thought of the sun breaking pale through the mists over

you

as you come to the pool where you will fish and of the mist

drifting

over the water, and of the cast fly resting light on the face of the

pool.

3.

And I am here in Kentucky in the place I have made myself

in the world. I sit on my porch above the river that flows muddy

and slow along the feet of the trees. I hear the voices of the wren

and the yellow-throated warbler whose songs pass near the

windows

and over the roof. In my house my daughter learns the womanhood

of her mother. My son is at play, pretending to be

the man he believes I am. I am the outbreathing of this ground.

My words are its words as the wren’s song is its song.

4.

Who has invented our enmity? Who had prescribed us

hatred of each other? Who has armed us against each other

with the death of the world? Who has appointed me such anger

that I should desire the burning of your house or the

destruction of your children?

Who has appointed such anger to you? Who has set loose the

thought

that we should oppose each other with the ruin of forests and

rivers, and the silence of birds?

Who has said to us that the voices of my land shall be strange

to you, and the voices of your land strange to me?

Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to

destroy you,

or that I could improve myself by destroying you? Who has

imagined

that your death could be negligible to me now that I have seen

these pictures of your face?

Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you,

or laugh with you, or visit in your house and go to work with

you in the forest?

And now one of the ideas of my place will be that you would

gladly talk and visit and work with me.

5.

I sit in the shade of the trees of the land I was born in.

As they are native I am native, and I hold to this place as

carefully as they hold to it.

I do not see the national flag flying from the staff of the

sycamore,

or any decree of the government written on the leaves of the

walnut,

nor has the elm bowed before the monuments or sworn the oath

of allegiance.

They have not declared to whom they stand in welcome.

6.

In the thought of you I imagine myself free of the weapons and

the official hates that I have borne on my back like a

hump,

and in the thought of myself I imagine you free of weapons and

official hates,

so that if we should meet we would not go by each other

looking at the ground like slaves sullen under their

burdens,

but would stand clear in the gaze of each other.

7.

There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with

you in silence beside the forest pool.

There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose

hands have learned a music and go their own way on the

keys.

There is no national glory so comely as my daughter who

dances and sings and is the brightness of my house.

There is no government so worthy as my son who laughs, as he

comes up the path from the river in the evening, for joy.

FARMING: A HANDBOOK

The Supplanting

When the road came, no longer bearing men,

but briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape,

the house fell to ruin, and only the old wife’s daffodils

rose in spring among the wild vines to be domestic

and to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the tangle

with white bloom. For a while in the years of its wilderness

a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor there

in the cold nights. And then I came, and set fire

to the remnants of the house and shed, and let time

hurry in the flame. I fired it so that all

would burn, and watched the blaze settle on the waste

like a shawl. I knew those old ones departed

then, and I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in me

something that would not bear my name – something that

bears us

through the flame, and is lightened of us, and is glad.

Sowing

In the stilled place that once was a road going down

from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew

a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders,

and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle

and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy

with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings

of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between

history’s death upon the place and the trees that would

have come

I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Winter Night Poem for Mary

As I started home after dark

I looked into the sky and saw the new moon,

an old man with a basket on his arm.

He walked among the cedars in the bare woods.

They stood like guardians, dark

as he passed. He might have been singing,

or he might not. He might have been sowing

the spring flowers, or he might not. But I saw him

with his basket, going along the hilltop.

Winter Nightfall

The fowls speak and sing, settling for the night.

The mare shifts in the bedding.

In her womb her foal sleeps and grows,

within and within and within. Her jaw grinds,

meditative in the fragrance of timothy.

Soon now my own rest will come.

The silent river flows on in the dusk, miles and miles.

Outside, the walls and on the roof and in the woods

the cold rain falls.

February 2, 1968

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,

war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,

I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds

of winter grains and of various legumes,

their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.

I have stirred into the ground the offal

and the decay of the growth of past seasons

and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.

All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling

into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,

not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness

and a delight to the air, and my days

do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,

for when the will fails so do the hands

and one lives at the expense of life.

After death, willing or not, the body serves,

entering the earth. And so what was heaviest

and most mute is at last raised up into song.

A Wet Time

The land is an ark, full of things waiting.

Underfoot it goes temporary and soft, tracks

filling with water as the foot is raised.

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