Home ⇒ 📌Wendell Berry ⇒ In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams
In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams
I.
The poem is important, but
Not more than the people
Whose survival it serves,
One of the necessities, so they may
Speak what is true, and have
The patience for beauty: the weighted
Grainfield, the shady street,
The well-laid stone and the changing tree
Whose branches spread above.
For want of songs and stories
They have dug away the soil,
Paved over what is left,
Set up their perfunctory walls
In tribute to no god,
For the love of no man or woman,
So that the good that was here
Cannot be called back
Except by long waiting, by great
Sorrows remembered and to come
By invoking the thunderstones
Of the world, and the vivid air.
II.
The poem is important,
As the want of it
Proves. It is the stewardship
Of its own possibility,
The past remembering itself
In the presence of
The present, the power learned
And handed down to see
What is present
And what is not: the pavement
Laid down and walked over
Regardlessly by exiles, here
Only because they are passing.
Oh, remember the oaks that were
Here, the leaves, purple and brown,
Falling, the nuthatches walking
Headfirst down the trunks,
Crying “onc! onc!” in the brightness
As they are doing now
In the cemetery across the street
Where the past and the dead
Keep each other. To remember,
To hear and remember, is to stop
And walk on again
To a livelier, surer measure.
It is dangerous
To remember the past only
For its own sake, dangerous
To deliver a message
You did not get.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)Related poetry:
- Light Is More Important Than The Lantern Light is more important than the lantern, The poem more important than the notebook, And the kiss more important than the lips. My letters to you Are greater and more important than both of us. The are the only documents Where people will discover Your beauty And my madness....
- Thinking Of A Friend At Night In this evil year, autumn comes early… I walk by night in the field, alone, the rain clatters, The wind on my hat…And you? And you, my friend? You are standing maybe and seeing the sickle moon Move in a small arc over the forests And bivouac fire, red in the black valley. You are […]...
- Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem And hold it up to the light Like a color slide Or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem And watch him probe his way out, Or walk inside the poem’s room And feel the walls for a light switch. I […]...
- TO BRENDA WILLIAMS 'WRITING AGAINST THE GRAIN' It was Karl Shapiro who wrote in his ‘Defence of Ignorance’ how many poets Go mad or seem to be so and the majority think we should all be in jail Or mental hospital and you have ended up in both places – fragile as bone china, Your pale skin taut, your fingers clasped tight […]...
- Thinking For Berky In the late night listening from bed I have joined the ambulance or the patrol Screaming toward some drama, the kind of end That Berky must have some day, if she isn’t dead. The wildest of all, her father and mother cruel, Farming out there beyond the old stone quarry Where highschool lovers parked their […]...
- Poem This poem is not addressed to you. You may come into it briefly, But no one will find you here, no one. You will have changed before the poem will. Even while you sit there, unmovable, You have begun to vanish. And it does no matter. The poem will go on without you. It has […]...
- Bruise blue Frail as smoke, she drifts through the crowded train, bringing with her the cold ashes of poverty. Without a word, her bruise-blue eyes try to niggle each passenger to part with coins or a note. The sign pleads her story: Three children in foster care. Like promises of happier times, some passengers toss hard-edged confetti […]...
- The New Poetry Handbook 1 If a man understands a poem, he shall have troubles. 2 If a man lives with a poem, he shall die lonely. 3 If a man lives with two poems, he shall be unfaithful to one. 4 If a man conceives of a poem, he shall have one less child. 5 If a man […]...
- Thinking of an Afterlife When was the beginning, In the fertilising, in the flower, Or was it deeper, In the earth beneath? No end of wonderment Shall cease such a quest, Or know how it is unknowable. We gaze on our cosmos in the cusp of a bloom, To glimpse the mysterious, grasp at reality, Surrender a dearth of […]...
- Motel Seedy The artisans of this room, who designed the lamp base (a huge red slug with a hole Where its heart should be) or chose this print Of a butterscotch sunset, Must have been abused in art class As children, forced to fingerpaint With a nose, or a tongue. To put this color Green exhausted grave […]...
- Paradise Motel Millions were dead; everybody was innocent. I stayed in my room. The President Spoke of war as of a magic love potion. My eyes were opened in astonishment. In a mirror my face appeared to me Like a twice-canceled postage stamp. I lived well, but life was awful. There were so many soldiers that day, […]...
- Poem (Faithful to your commands, o consciousness) Poem Faithful to your commands, o consciousness, o Beating wings, I studied The roses and the muses of reality, The deceptions and the deceptive elation of the redness of the growing morning, And all the greened and thomed variety of the vines of error, which begin by promising Everything and more than everything, and then […]...
- Where the Sidewalk Ends There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind. Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark […]...
- Mrs. Williams I was the milliner Talked about, lied about, Mother of Dora, Whose strange disappearance Was charged to her rearing. My eye quick to beauty Saw much beside ribbons And buckles and feathers And leghorns and felts, To set off sweet faces, And dark hair and gold. One thing I will tell you And one I […]...
- Dora Williams When Reuben Pantier ran away and threw me I went to Springfield. There I met a lush, Whose father just deceased left him a fortune. He married me when drunk. My life was wretched. A year passed and one day they found him dead. That made me rich. I moved on to Chicago. After a […]...
- Submergence When along the pavement, Palpitating flames of life, People flicker round me, I forget my bereavement, The gap in the great constellation, The place where a star used to be. Nay, though the pole-star Is blown out like a candle, And all the heavens are wandering in disarray, Yet when pleiads of people are Deployed […]...
- If anybody's friend be dead If anybody’s friend be dead It’s sharpest of the theme The thinking how they walked alive At such and such a time Their costume, of a Sunday, Some manner of the Hair A prank nobody knew but them Lost, in the Sepulchre How warm, they were, on such a day, You almost feel the date […]...
- TO BRENDA WILLIAMS ON HER FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY The years become you as Oxford becomes you, As you became Oxford through the protest years; From Magdalen’s grey gargoyles to its bridge in May, From the cement buttresses of Wellington Square To Balliol, Balliol in the rain. The years become you as the Abbey Road becomes you, As you became that road through silent […]...
- Variations On A Theme By William Carlos Williams 1 I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do And its wooden beams were so inviting. 2 We laughed at the hollyhocks together And then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do […]...
- Madmen They say you can jinx a poem If you talk about it before it is done. If you let it out too early, they warn, Your poem will fly away, And this time they are absolutely right. Take the night I mentioned to you I wanted to write about the madmen, As the newspapers so […]...
- Larry Levis My poem would eat nothing. I tried giving it water But it said no, Worrying me. Day after day, I held it up to the llight, Turning it over, But it only pressed its lips More tightly together. It grew sullen, like a toad Through with being teased. I offered it money, My clothes, my […]...
- Bag-Snatching In Dublin Sisely Walked so nicely With footsteps so discreet To see her pass You’d never guess She walked upon the street. Down where the Liffey waters’ turgid flood Churns up to greet the ocean-driven mud, A bruiser in fix Murdered her for 6/6....
- Do you know who is thinking of you? If you start out every day in the same old gloomy way It’s little wonder what other people think of you, but The ones who matter most are the ones who hold you close In their hearts, who’re always thinking of you; Do you know, do you know, Do you know who is thinking of […]...
- Prospect NSW (For Anita Cobby) The hushed dark hugs the streets. Somewhere a cat snaps the silence. Dogs begin to bark, like a pack moving in for the kill. Women shrink in their homes. Shadows slip through the night and stars dim their lights as cars flash past. When they disappear, silence, heavy as hate, descends. Hours stretch like elastic […]...
- Just Thinking Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window. No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held For awhile. Some dove somewhere. Been on probation most of my life. And The rest of my life been condemned. So these moments Count for a lot peace, you know. Let the bucket of memory down into […]...
- Glass was the Street in tinsel Peril Glass was the Street in tinsel Peril Tree and Traveller stood Filled was the Air with merry venture Hearty with Boys the Road Shot the lithe Sleds like shod vibrations Emphasized and gone It is the Past’s supreme italic Makes this Present mean...
- On Thinking Faculty 1/ One sorriest thing in life is our capacity With which we think that we think. Some do it with brains, some with hearts, Some stomachs, and some genitals. 2/ Vocabulary is useless without thoughts....
- Poetry I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because […]...
- I Am There I come from there and remember, I was born like everyone is born, I have a mother And a house with many windows, I have brothers, friends and a prison. I have a wave that sea-gulls snatched away. I have a view of my own and an extra blade of grass. I have a moon […]...
- February: Thinking of Flowers Now wind torments the field, Turning the white surface back On itself, back and back on itself, Like an animal licking a wound. Nothing but white the air, the light; Only one brown milkweed pod Bobbing in the gully, smallest Brown boat on the immense tide. A single green sprouting thing Would restore me. . […]...
- XVII (Thinking, Tangling Shadows…) Thinking, tangling shadows in the deep solitude. You are far away too, oh farther than anyone. Thinking, freeing birds, dissolving images, Burying lamps. Belfry of fogs, how far away, up there! Stifling laments, milling shadowy hopes, Taciturn miller, Night falls on you face downward, far from the city. Your presence is foreign, as strange to […]...
- The White House Your door is shut against my tightened face, And I am sharp as steel with discontent; But I possess the courage and the grace To bear my anger proudly and unbent. The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet, A chafing savage, down the decent street; And passion rends my vitals as I pass, Where […]...
- Mingus At The Showplace I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen And so I swung into action and wrote a poem And it was miserable, for that was how I thought Poetry worked: you digested experience shat Literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since Defunct, on West 4th st., and I sat at the bar, […]...
- Thinking Ahead To Possible Options And A Worst-Case Scenario I swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel In the center of the road and that’s when The deer came charging out of the forest And forced me to hit the brakes for all I Was worth and I careened back to the other Side of the road just as a skunk came toddling Out of […]...
- James Garber Do you remember, passer-by, the path I wore across the lot where now stands the opera house, Hasting with swift feet to work through many years? Take its meaning to heart: You too may walk, after the hills at Miller’s Ford Seem no longer far away; Long after you see them near at hand, Beyond […]...
- Eulogy To A Hell Of A Dame some dogs who sleep ay night Must dream of bones And I remember your bones In flesh And best In that dark green dress And those high-heeled bright Black shoes, You always cursed when you drank, Your hair coimng down you Wanted to explode out of What was holding you: Rotten memories of a Rotten […]...
- Blood Oranges In 1936, a child In Hitler’s Germany, What did I know about the war in Spain? Andalusia was a tango On a wind-up gramophone, Franco a hero’s face in the paper. No one told me about a poet For whose sake I might have learned Spanish Bleeding to death on a barren hill. All I […]...
- The Learner I’ve learned Of all the friends I’ve won Dame Nature is the best, And to her like a child I run Craving her mother breast To comfort me in soul distress, And in green glade to find Far from the world’s unloveliness Pure peace of mind. I’ve learned the worth of simple ways, And though […]...
- For Harry (My College Room-mate who Died) He cut his hand and it bled, the flesh Inside was red and the hurt discounted the flood Of red and vibrant blood that pulsed From the wound. But he was a warrior, A son whose mien would not countenance the pain And he bound the wound in strips of flax And stalked from the […]...
- George Who played with a Dangerous Toy, and suffered a Catastrophe of considerable Dimensions When George’s Grandmamma was told That George had been as good as gold, She promised in the afternoon To buy him an Immense BALLOON. And so she did; but when it came, It got into the candle flame, And being of a […]...