At the Window with Wendell Berry

~With lines from Berry’s “Window Poems” (1968)

Window. Window. / The wind’s eye—

and I rise to the year’s ending.

A turning of soil—how bruising

the world—news of [ ].

My view quieted by the leafless Japanese

maple branches tipped with rain.

And then an Anna’s hummingbird—

a crimson siren warning

of warming? Or just beauty’s

glancing blow—

enough to startle

my slumber, the pose I’ve assumed

through this season.

The fragile glass compelling

me into another year.

Or is it you Wendell?

Urgent and silent at my side.

The foliage has dropped / beneath the window’s grave edge—

November began with loss. Mourning

has become a national pastime.

I keep a family photo on my screen—

happiness enshrined in the window before

the window. My mind toggles.

A friend says I write joy/sorrow.

I hope for snow, a smothering.

Instead, the horizon—

an endless sweep of rain—

distance measured in weather.

In Kentucky, you might step

out into the surprising snap of winter.

The window has forty / panes, forty clarities—

I have seen so many versions of myself—

each a fraction. This day frozen

in the temperature

of gray. You know

fragmentation: Who we choose

to be. Who chooses us.

I have chosen you, dear poet.

I know you have much to say.

This is the wind’s eye. / Wendell’s window

once eyed the countryside—in a country

now altered, no altar left to your river

or valley or chickadee. With artifice,

we have rushed into the wilderness.

If this is tomorrow,

if this is the precipice—

Here behind the glass,

I count rain crystals on branches—

my morning rosary. A prayer

latches in the window catch.

Look in / and see him looking out.

I turn to you poet when trapped—

strange muse

in this room of worries.

What fortune to have found you—

on the days my own river recedes.

Often the window

spurns—and yet.

A warm day in December / and the rain falling

as both the poet and I work steadily at our windows—

Somedays, I change my view—

look out to the sea—

But today, I face east to the garden

and the forest beyond—it is birdless.

I consider scattering the seed my sister

gave for Christmas, for when it is cruel

and they are hungry she said.

Not today—

Outside the window—

the soil is being cured—

after a decade, it’s spent. I’ve spent

over a decade in this old house.

My husband tends to its aches—

replacing the joints and faucets,

the rot from winter storms.

Wendell too works what he owns—

home and farm.

Today, I hear from friends

with homes lost to wildfire.

Once we were neighbors.

I remember afternoons

in bright kitchens. Our children

racing from room to room to room—

like my memories today—

running recklessly to forget nothing.

The river is rising, / approaching the window—

I am writing again, it runs swift

without eddy or swirl.

I know that’s not what you meant poet,

but I am happy in metaphor today—

and keen to write over the sorrow

of the world beyond my window—

It took my sleep last night.

By morning the fog lifted,

a northern wind ushering in the sun—

I face west today, let the light flicker.

There is a sort of vertical / geography that portions his life.

I turn the page to see what

you mean by this, Wendell.

Birds, it seems—

Out my window, I see

sparrows or they may be

wrens. An occasional jay

and often goldfinch, robin

and hummingbirds.

We live a different life,

bound to our windows.

You with your pencils,

I with my keyboard—

convinced some days

that I might fly.

10.

Rising the river / is wild. There is no end—

No mouth coughing into the sea—

no finality. I showed up late,

shoving my kayak in. No time to drift—

Some days I wake up like you, Wendell,

already up to my hips, the current

grasping my legs. I am learning

when to resist and when to give.

Let the river rise over trout

or northern pike, me.

My life remote from the everything—

even as the world

stands on the riverbank,

shouting.

11.

How fine / to have a long-legged house

alive between sea and forest between

city and sea. When I sweep

and scrub its old floors,

it hums. Even the garden—

tucked in for winter—

Even all the spirits who once—

This union of timber and soil

and human turmoil.

In an old photo of our cottage—

second story not yet present—

it crouches as if to avoid the slap

of storm. Thousands of storms—

I wash the salt-sprayed windows

of their history.

12.

The country where he lives / is haunted

by errors. They mount

don’t they Wendell?

Like the mountain ranges here

out my window—snow-covered,

to hide our shame. At war within,

again. At war beyond, again.

It’s been nearly sixty years—

you at the window—watchful.

Some days, I’m like that housefly,

ticking the window.

13.

Sometimes he thinks the earth / might be better without humans—

I too imagine it when I watch an orca pod cross the sound

out my window, hungry for salmon. A decade ago,

the beach crackled underfoot with crab and clam shells.

Today, I woke at four to worry the moon-filtered morning—

fires surrounding my once home, the elected [ ], wars.

Human muck. Yet, neither you, Wendell, nor I want to be the first

to leave. We welcome grandchildren, fewer now.

There’s that.

14.

The longest night is past.

I rise in the gloom.

It seeps beneath my skin.

And fog all day.

So, I go to the mountains—

where the sun icicles through

the peaks. Where breath suspends

in air—

15.

The sycamore gathers / out of the sky. White

as desert bones or the smoke rising

from my neighbor’s chimney.

Or perhaps as you, old poet—stilled

at the window.

Sometimes I imagine my window

opening into your landscape—

your vista mapping over

my own as a 3D image—

mountains soften into hills, sea

washes up the mouth of your river—

Douglas fir branch into white pine,

maple whitens into sycamore—

beneath our shared sky.

16.

His mind gone from the window, / into dark thought—

as if the blinds dropped

and the poet kept

looking. No distraction

of weather or river—

only the slow tilling

of the soil within.

Sometimes I arrive to the window,

eyes closed to the allure

of leaf and feather—

my obsidian mind writing

against the glass. Then,

as with your kingfisher,

the sun betrays me, dazzling

the panes. Let’s look out

through our windows—

Now ninety, what do you see?

17.

For a night and a day,

I pretend that the blue

hummingbird I glimpse

through the window was

real. That she had flown

from the deep high forests

of Martinique or Dominica

to the Pacific Northwest.

An impossibility I know—

The frolicking elephant seal,

an invasion of hundreds

of sea lions—

rare window sightings

easily explained.

But this blue blink

of bird—

18.

The window grows fragile /in a time of war—

violence etches the panes—

a furious obliteration until

we cannot see.

Unlit within—

what brutality rises?

Oh Wendell.

Today I listened to a soldier—

how time stills to the certain

at the front: to the trench, gun,

the amount of ammo,

the man to his left

and right. Last night—

an eggshell ceasefire.

I think of you at your window—

over a half century later—

each pane, every war.

19.

Peace. May he waken / not too late from his wraths—

to find the window waiting like a hungry dog.

The Aymara people believe the past

lies in front of us—the known—

while the unknown future shadows, unseen.

I wake most days into an anxious wilderness

with only the déja vu of my life as comfort.

I wonder if your perspective has changed Wendell.

Or your expectation of the world beyond your window—

the resolute thrush, sycamore, fox and owl—

how light alters a landscape—and peace

emerges as snowdrops. When you look ahead, tell me

Wendell, what does your past know

of the hunger we wake to?

20.

In the early morning dark—

before the tragic hours that tickertape this day,

I carry a strong coffee to the window—

await a blue dawn.

I’m looking to you, poet, for some solace—

you offer God—and a dream

of peace—your words echo

the words of Martin Luther King—

the man we honor today.

While another assumes

to lead us—

into the inferno.

Did you dream last night?

As you sit at the window this morning—

will you write peace?

Or have these decades worn

out the elbows of your faith?

21.

He has known a tunnel—

I sense your fear, Wendell,

the uncoiling snake of it.

All the levers you cannot pull—

I read that it snowed half a foot

in Port Royal in 1968—

snow tunneling your drive home.

It’s cold in this country today.

You and I know to seek refuge

at the exposed window

as night crosses its arms.

My face mirrors in the window—

at the mouth of a tunnel—

knowing only that you

emerged decades ago

from a tumbling fear—

22.

Still sleeping he heard / the phoebe call, and woke to it—

like a partner’s hand on your shoulder—

in the way that you imagine the bird call

or the weight on the shoulder as something else—

a snowbank giving way, the far-off siren, the car veering—

throwing you against the door just before

you wake to realize it was phoebe or lover—

morning offering a kinder version of your life.

I am finally sleeping well

for the first time in decades—

I am in love with sleep

even if my dream world screeches,

runs me through its maze of cliffs

and chasms. Whatever happens in the twisted

sheets, I invite it—

23.

He stood on the ground / and saw his wife borne away—

This morning, I watch my love leave

for the mountains, then I return to my rooms.

Dust away the bright winter light

that exposes my white-petaled self

like hellebore before the impending freeze.

The garden has misinterpreted January sun

for spring, budding before the window—

before the world’s cruelty.

24.

His love returns / and walks among the trees—

As does mine, trailing our dog on a path

knuckled by massive maples. The brief rupture

of our togetherness softened—

and invited a silence like our breath

clouding the cold air as we walk.

A welcome interlude from the anguish

bristling across the land.

At the window, I accept the waning sun—

the embellished evening horizon.

Tomorrow the rains resume.

25.

The bloodroot is white / in the woods and men renew / their abuse of the world /and each other.

A raven flashes across my window. We are rooted in violence—yet beautiful

if you come across us in a sunny hollow. My fear indistinguishable from hunger.

I think the answer is anesthesia or idiocy. You may have chosen another door—

anger or activism or hope—each a hinge to some elsewhere—

where another wickedness abounds. My husband killed a mole with a shovel—

after years of its travels through our small stamp of land. Nonetheless he mourned

his success. Now, the earth again seems unsettled, it seethes and ruptures

at whim. If you reach for your shovel, poet, and I do the same—

writing across a country, over half a century—with what aim?

26.

In the heron’s eye / is one of the dies of change.

The pair of herons that fished in the Sound

beyond our front garden are now one—

and their companion bald eagle gone.

We are awash in high tides,

wood drifts from the mills

and jellyfish surface like small moons.

Wendell, I tell you this, so you know

of my world—the salt of it.

27.

Now that April with sweet rain—

Something to anticipate at the end of winter.

Rhododendron, plum, azalea and cherry

blossoms drinking the rain in—

a champagne toast to spring.

I can imagine another season

with you my dear Wendell—

windows rain-washed,

our work like seeds—

Until then, there is snow

and wind’s teeth on our necks.