The Gift of Gravity by Wendell Berry

All that passes descends,

and ascends again unseen

into the light: the river

coming down from sky

to hills, from hills to sea,

and carving as it moves,

to rise invisible,

gathered to light, to return

again. "The river's injury

is its shape." I've learned no more.

We are what we are given

and what is taken away;

blessed be the name

of the giver and taker.

For everything that comes

is a gift, the meaning always

carried out of sight

to renew our whereabouts,

always a starting place.

And every gift is perfect

in its beginning, for it

is "from above, and cometh down

from the Father of lights."

Gravity is grace.

All that has come to us

has come as the river comes,

given in passing away.

And if our wickedness

destroys the watershed,

dissolves the beautiful field,

then I must grieve and learn

that I possess by loss

the earth I live upon

and stand in and am. The dark

and then the light will have it.

I am newborn of pain

to love the new-shaped shore

where young cottonwoods

take hold and thrive in the wound,

kingfishers already nesting

in a hole in the sheared bank.

"What is left is what is"--

have learned no more. The shore

turns green under the songs

of the fires of the world's end,

and what is there to do?

Imagine what exists

so that it may shine

in thought light and day light,

lifted up in the mind.

The dark returns to light 

in the kingfisher's blue and white

richly laid together.

He falls into flight

from the broken ground,

with strident outcry gathers

air under his wings.

In work of love, the body

forgets its weight. And once

again with love and singing

in mind, I come to what

must come to me, carried

as a dancer by a song.

This grace is gravity.

Self-Talk

For the moments when you want to scream and tear your hair out in frustration:

Remember.

From three years, five years, ten years

"Down the road," as they say,

Or downstream, even better.

Remember this moment

As it will be when

The hot flush has long cooled,

The tears have evaporated

Behind a veil of laughter and other griefs.

Perhaps the memory will give you

A little consolation and

A little perspective.

A little and yet enough to get by.

In a Subjunctive Mood

A morning spent enthralled by

The bobbing dance of a rose thrust

On its stem toward the sky blue;

An afternoon lulled to watchful stillness by

The birdsong of a hundred unseen friends hid

High in the crowns of the trees;

A night caught breathless and trembling by

The span of the starry sphere laid

Out like a map inked with fire.

And you come,

Foreign traveler, alien and stranger,

Invader in this, my other place,

With hands full of beauty

And fingers spread wide. It is

A generosity unspecific, and yet,

I take it to myself and cherish:

In the songless, flowerless winter,

Your light would keep me warm.

So Sorry; After the Fall

Ich und du; aber
Du bist "ich" und
Ich bin "du."
She who comes from nothing
And likewise dissolves
Into naught, distributed
Unequally (like a comet trail in space).
Or:
Not even such dignity as that,
For:
If thou exist not for I,
Then thou never wert at all.

"we are for each other." The riddle at the heart of being is the autonomous man and the situated self: I am as I am, but I am for you also, in that I exist for you in a particular way, composed by you in your mind and bound up in a concept. It is, shall we say, your particular nominal essence of me. cummings wrote of love, or at least of feeling, and perhaps did not mean any such philosophical observation. Even so, the observation holds.

What happens when you are for me, but I am not for you? Then only one of us exists, and the other remains bound. There can be no mutually life-giving relationship between a person and an inanimate object. It is the slow starvation of a soul, through refusal to acknowledge its independently valuable existence. The two part ways, and that, itself, is a death in the ending.