Flashback: September 21, 2012
The Design of a House by Wendell Berry
"Love has conceived a house,
and out of its labor
brought forth its likeness
- the emblem of desire,
continuing though the flesh falls away.
Love foresees a jointure
composing a house, a marriage of contraries,
compendium of opposites in equilibrium.
Let severeness be as dividing
as budleaves around the flower!
- woman and child enfolded, chosen within.
This is a love poem for you -
among wars, among brutal forfeitures of time
in this house,
among latent fires and stillness,
among all that honesty must see,
I accept and love you.
And our Baby,
precious and periled in her happy mornings,
whose tears are mine.
Love has visualized a house,
and out of its expenditure
fleshed the design at this cross ways
of consciousness and time:
Its form is growth come to light in it;
croulants, gardens,
are of its architecture,
labor its realization,
cities we have gone to and come back
are the prospect of its doorways.
And there's a city it dreams of."
