Terrapin
Author: Wendell Berry
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: Tom Pohrt spent years gathering those poems of Wendell Berry's he imagined children might read and appreciate, making sketches to accompany his selection. Over the past several years a dialogue has evolved in which the poet has come to advise the illustrator on the natural history of the animals and plants seen so intimately in the poems. Then came the august book designer Dave Bullen, who has been designing the books of Wendell Berry for more than thirty years. The resulting volume of 21 poems includes dozens of the sketches, drawings and watercolors in what amounts to a visual meditation on
Publisher: Counterpoint

In memory of my brother Karl Weidner Pohrt

Tom Pohrt

978-1-61902-414-4   (eBook)

Copyright © Tanya Berry 2014

Illustrations copyright © Tom Pohrt 2014

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berry, Wendell, 1934–

[Poems. Selections]

Terrapin and other poems / Wendell Berry ; illustrations by Tom Pohrt
pages ; cm

ISBN 978-1-61902-425-0

I. Pohrt, Tom. II. Title.

PS3552.E75A6 2014

811'.54—dc23      2014022404

Cover design by David Bullen

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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Contents

1. April Woods: Morning
2. October 10
3. The Sorrel Filly
4. March Snow
5. Woods
6. The Snake
7. A Squirrel
8. The First
9. Winter Night Poem for Mary
10. The Terrapin
11. Sleep
12. The Finches
13. Walnut St., Oak St., Sycamore St., etc.
14. Her First Calf
15. To Know the Dark
16. Planting Trees
17. Spring
18. The Unseeable Animal
19. My Nose
20. Falling Asleep
21. Fall

Terrapin

April Woods: Morning

Birth of color
out of night and the ground.

Luminous the gatherings
of bloodroot

newly risen, green leaf,
white flower

in the sun, the dark
grown absent.

October 10

Now constantly there is the sound,
quieter than rain,
of the leaves falling.

Under their loosening bright
gold, the sycamore limbs
bleach whiter.

Now the only flowers
are beeweed and aster, spray
of their white and lavender
over the brown leaves.

The calling of the crow sounds
loud—a landmark—now
that the life of summer falls
silent, and the nights grow.

The Sorrel Filly

The songs of small birds fade away
into the bushes after sundown,
the air dry, sweet with goldenrod.

Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters
flare in the dusk, The aged voices
of a few crickets thread the silence.

It is a quiet I love, though my life
too often drives me through it deaf.

Busy with costs and losses, I waste
the time I have to be here—a time
blessed beyond my deserts, as I know,
if only I would keep aware. The leaves
rest in the air, perfectly still.

I would like them to rest in my mind
as still, as simply spaced. As I approach,
the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing,
poised there, light on the slope
as a young apple tree. A week ago

I took her away to sell, and failed
to get my price, and brought her home
again. Now in the quiet I stand
and look at her a long time, glad
to have recovered what is lost
in the exchange of something for money.

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.

Woods

I part out the thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.

Though I am silent
there is singing around me.

Though I am dark
there is vision around me.

Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.

The Snake

At the end of October

I found on the floor of the woods
a small snake whose back
was patterned with the dark
of the dead leaves he lay on.

His body was thickened with a mouse
or small bird. He was cold,
so stuporous with his full belly
and the fall air that he hardly
troubled to flicker his tongue.

I held him a long time, thinking
of the perfection of the dark
marking on his back, the death
that swelled him, his living cold.

Now the cold of him stays
in my hand, and I think of him
lying below the frost,
big with a death to nourish him
during a long sleep.

A Squirrel

Here’s a fellow who leaves his hole

On Sunday, to loaf and invite his soul.

He looks into a hollow beech tree

To see what he can or can’t see.

The day is bright. He’s in no haste,

Although there was one time at least

He should have hurried more than he did.

He should have run to his hole and hid;

Some hairs were missing from his tail

Where a hawk just barely missed a meal.

This squirrel just barely kept ahead

Of what he’d be if he was dead.

He’s the proven perfect master

Of his last meeting with disaster,

And now he has that bare pretext

Not to worry about the next.

The First

The first man who whistled
thought he had a wren in his mouth.

He went around all day
with his lips puckered,
afraid to swallow.

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.

The Terrapin

The terrapin and his house are one.

Though he may go, he’s never gone.

He’s housed within, from nose to toe:

A door, a floor, and no window.

There’s little room; the light is dim;

His furniture is only him.

He sits alone, says naught aloud;

Where no guest comes, a thought’s a shout.

He pokes along; he’s in no haste;

He has no map and no suitcase;

He has no worries, and no woes,

For where he is is where he goes.

Ponder this wonder under his dome.

Who, wandering, is always home.

Sleep

I love to lie down weary
under the stalk of sleep
growing slowly out of my head,
the dark leaves meshing.

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 seasons to follow.

May the bare sticks soon

live, and our minds go free
of the ground
into the shining of trees.

Walnut St., Oak St., Sycamore St., Etc.

So this is what happened
to the names of the trees!

I heard them fly up,
whistling, out of the woods.

But I did not know
where they had gone.

Her First Calf

Her fate seizes her and brings her
down. She is heavy with it. It
wrings her. The great weight
is heaved out of her. It eases.

She moves into what she has become,
sure in her fate now
as a fish free in the current.

She turns to the calf who has broken
out of the womb’s water and its veil.

He breathes. She licks his wet hair.

He gathers his legs under him
and rises. He stands, and his legs
wobble. After the months
of his pursuit of her, now
they meet face to face.

From the beginnings of the world
his arrival and her welcome
have been prepared. They have always
known each other.

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.

Planting Trees

In the mating of trees,
the pollen grain entering invisible
the domed room of the winds, survives
the ghost of the old forest
that stood here when we came. The ground
invites it, and it will not be gone.

I become the familiar of that ghost
and its ally, carrying in a bucket
twenty trees smaller than weeds,
and I plant them along the way
of the departure of the ancient host.

I return to the ground its original music.

It will rise out of the horizon
of the grass, and over the heads
of the weeds, and it will rise over
the horizon of men’s heads. As I age
in the world it will rise and spread,
and be for this place horizon
and orison, the voice of its winds.

I have made myself a dream to dream
of its rising, that has gentled my nights.

Let me desire and wish well the life
these trees may live when I
no longer rise in the mornings
to be pleased by the green of them
shining, and their shadows on the ground,
and the sound of the wind in them.

Spring

A shower like a little song

Overtook him going home,

Wet his shoulders, and went on.

The Unseeable Animal

My Daughter: “I hope there’s an animal

Somewhere that nobody has ever seen.

And I hope nobody ever sees it.”

Being, whose flesh dissolves
at our glance, knower
of the secret sums and measures,
you are always here,
dwelling in the oldest sycamores,

visiting the faithful springs
when they are dark and the foxes
have crept to their edges.

I have come upon pools
in streams, places overgrown
with the woods’ shadow,
where I knew you had rested,
watching the little fish
hang still in the flow;
as I approached they seemed
particles of your clear mind
disappearing among the rocks.

I have waked deep in the woods
in the early morning, sure
that while I slept
your gaze passed over me.

That we do not know you
is your perfection
and our hope. The darkness
keeps us near you.

My Nose

I fear my dear nose

May look like an onion,

But I have not asked

For a second opinion.

Because I’m afraid

I just could not bear it

If I should hear, “No.

It looks like a carrot.”

Falling Asleep

Raindrops on the tin roof.

What do they say?

We have all

Been here before.

Fall

for Wallace Fowlie

The wild cherries ripen, black and fat,

Paradisal fruits that taste of no man’s sweat.

Reach up, pull down the laden branch, and eat;

When you have learned their bitterness, they taste sweet.