From Window Poems

It looks like we will be blessed with spring rain for the next few day--weather I most often love. This promise of a spring baptism has me thinking about how others situate rain and I recalled a lovely book of poems by Wendell Berry I had sitting on a shelf. This is the closing poem from Berry's book, Window Poems. I love how the known world among all that rising green is adrift in mystery, and how all of this gets sprung into motion when April with sweet rain comes.


27.

Now that April with sweet rain
has come to Port Royal again,
Burley Coulter rows out
on the river to fish.
He sits all day in his boat,
tied to a willow, his hat
among green branches,
his dark line curving
in the wind. He is one
with the sun.
The current's horses graze
in the shade along the banks.
The watcher leaves his window
and goes out.
He sits in the woods, watched
by more than he sees.
What is his
past. He has come
to a roofless place
and a windowless.
There is a wild light
his mind loses
until the spring renews,
but it holds his mind
and will not let it rest.
The window is a fragment
of the world suspended
in the world, the known
adrift in mystery.
And now the green
rises. The window has an edge
that is celestial,
where the eyes are surpassed.