Duality So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. I To love is to suffer – did I know this when first I asked you for your love? I did not. And yet until I knew, I could not know what I asked, or gave. I gave a suffering that I took: yours and mine, mine when yours; and yours I have feared most. II What can bring us past this knowledge, so that you will never wish our life undone? For if ever you wish it so, then I must wish so too, and lovers yet unborn, whom we are reaching toward with love, will turn to this page, and find it blank. III I have feared to be unknown and to offend – I must speak, then, against the dread of speech. What if, hearing, you have no reply, and mind’s despair annul the body’s hope? Life in time may justify any conclusion, whenever our will is to conclude. IV Look at me now. Now, after all the years, look at me who have no beauty apart from what we two have been and made. Look at me with the look that anger and pain have taught you, the gaze in which nothing is guarded, nothing withheld. V You look at me, you give a light, which I bear and return, and we are held, and all our time is held, in this touching look – this touch that, pressed against the touch returning in the dark, is almost sight. We burn and see by our own light. VI Eyes looking into eyes looking into eyes, touches that see in the dark, remember Paradise, our true home. God’s image recalls us to Itself. We move with motion not our own, light upon light, day and night, sway as two trees in the same wind sway. VII Let us come to no conclusion, but let our bodies burn in time’s timelessness. Heaven and earth give us to this night in which we tell each other of a Kingdom yet to come, saying its secret, its silent names. We become fleshed words, one another’s uttered joy. VIII Joined in our mortal motion, we come to the resurrection of words; they rise up in our mouths, set free of taints, errors, and bad luck. In their new clarities the leaf brightens, the air clears, the syllables of water are clear in the dark air as stars. IX We come, unsighted, in the dark, to the great feast of lovers where nothing is withheld. That we are there we know by touch, by inner sight. They all are here, who by their giving take, by taking give, who by their living love, and by loving live. Wendell Berry
Posted on: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 23:48:02 +0000
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