Pryor Thomas Berry
March 4, 1864 – February 23, 1946
All day our eyes could find no resting place.
Over a flood of snow sight came back
Empty to the mind. The sun
In a shutter of clouds, light
Staggered down the fall of snow.
All circling surfaces of earth were white.
No shape or shadow moved the flight
Of winter birds. Snow held the earth its silence.
We could pick no birdsong from the wind.
At nightfall our father turned his eyes away.
It was this storm of silence shook out his ghost.
We sleep; he only wakes
Who is unshapen in a night of snow.
His shadow in the shadow of the earth
Moves the dark to wholeness.
We wait beside his body here, his image
Shape of silence in the room.
Sifting
Down the wind, the winter rain
Spirals about the town
And the church hill’s jut of stones.
Under the mounds, below
The weather’s moving, the numb dead know
No fitfulness of wind.
On the road that in his knowledge ends
We bear our father to the earth.
We have adorned the shuck of him
With flowers as for a bridal, burned
Lamps about him, held death apart
Until the grave should mound it whole.
Behind us rain breaks the corners
Of our father’s house, quickens
On the downslope to noise.
Our steps
Clamor in his silence, who tracked
The sun to autumn in the dust.
Below the hill
The river bears the rain away, that cut
His fields their shape and stood them dry.
Water wearing the earth
Is the shape of the earth,
The river flattening in its bends.
Their mingling held
Ponderable in his words—
Knowledge polished on a stone.
River and earth and sun and wind disjoint,
Over his silence flow apart. His words
Are sharp to memory as cold rain
But are not ours.
We stare dumb
Upon the fulcrum dust, across which death
Lifts up our love. There is no more to add
To this perfection. We turn away
Into the shadow of his death.
Time in blossom and fruit and seed,
Time in the dust huddles in his darkness.
The world, spun in its shadow, holds all.
Until the morning comes his death is ours.
Until morning comes say of the blind bird:
His feet are netted with darkness, or he flies
His heart’s distance in the darkness of his eyes.
A season’s sun will light him no tree green.
Spring tangles shadow and light,
Branches of trees
Knit vision and wind.
The shape of the wind is a tree
Bending, spilling its birds.
From the cloud to the stone
The rain stands tall,
Columned into his darkness.
The church hill heals our father in.
Our remembering moves from a different place.