Thrush Music: American Poet-Naturalists and the Poetics of Loss | p 4
But listen again to the Mockingbird, as it sings, with strong echoes of Whitman's "Out of the Cradle," in Wendell Berry's "Song in a Year of Catastrophe," from a collection of poems entitled Farming: A Handbook. For Berry, custodian of a marginal farm in the Kentucky hills, the work of renewing connections between words and things goes hand in hand with the farmer's work of nourishing the soil that feeds him. Thus the Mockingbird speaks to both farmer and poet:
"Go look under the leaves,"
it said, "for what is living there
is long dead in your tongue."
And it said, "Put your hands
into the earth. Live close
to the ground. Learn the darkness.
Gather round you all
the things that you love, name
their names, prepare
to lose them.
The voice stays with him, "a mockingbird idly singing/ in the autumn of catastrophe." Its song is interrupted by the sound of an engine, a voice offering "Change or slavery?,” other voices answering, "Slavery!" These are the sounds of industrial farming and the society of unrestrained consumption feeding at its troughs. The speaker says, "I was afraid, loving/ what I knew would be lost." And the bird tells him, "You have not yet come close enough."
"...Study the coat of the mole.
For the farmer shall wear
the furrows and the greenery
of his fields, and bear
the long standing of the woods."
And I asked: "You mean death, then?"
"Yes," the voice said. "Die
into what the earth requires of you."
I let go all holds then, and sank
like a hopeless swimmer into the earth,
and at last came fully into the ease
and the joy of that place,
all my lost ones returning.
"That place" has such a rich meaning here: the earth, the farm, also the present moment as the speaker's place in a current of farmwork flowing through him and binding him to those who preceded and who will follow him. And there is also the speaker's place in an order of things, his obedience to the conditions of his mortality and of the choices he has made. Elsewhere, Berry defines place as a kind of decorum or propriety: the "right livelihood, right neighborhood, and caretaking" that lead to an "ecological intelligence: a sense of the impossibility of acting or living alone or solely in one's own behalf." Gary Snyder calls it an etiquette, "The Etiquette of Freedom," a way of living in a threatened world and working to preserve its wildness, whether there is hope or not. "Practically speaking," he says, "a life vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us closer to the actually existing world and its wholeness."
Northern Mockingbird
Wood Thrush