Tumble Creek flows past,
Fluid, changing, carrying
Life and death like years.
life
Return
I always thought I’d return
one day, maybe after I’d finally
gotten things together
and had something to brag about,
some big story to tell—after
I’d made a name for myself and arrived.
Now it’s been 26 years
and of course I’ve nothing
much to show for it. A few
good gardens; the day I watched
a banana spider spin her web
from start to finish; that night
I spent sleepless and saw the moon
so large and orange and pretty
that I cried, wondering at it all;
a few lines of poetry strung out
on the pages of a life
still being written.
Clouds
brief as indrawn breath
cottonwhite clouds mist away
into nothingness
Wendell Berry: Sabbath Poem VI, 2001
Paul Cézanne: Mont Sainte-Victoire (c. 1887)
The question before me, now that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which I know from enough practice,
but how to be alive, as these worn
hills still tell, and some paintings
of Paul Cézanne, and this mere
singing wren, who thinks he’s alive
forever, this instant, and may be.
–Wendell Berry
