February 16: The Country of Marriage

[February Feels Like]

5.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange

of my love and work for yours, so much for so much

of an expendable fund. We don't know what its limits are—

that puts it in the dark. We are more together

than we know, how else could we keep on discovering 

we are more together than we thought?

You are the known way leading always to the unknown,

and you are the known place to which the unknown is always

leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,

I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing 

not belittled by my saying that I possess it.

Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing

a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only

accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light

enough to live, and then accepts the dark,

passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I 

have fallen time and again from the great strength

of my desire, helpless, into your arms. 

6.

What I am learning to give you is my death

to set you free of me, and me from myself

into the dark and the new light. Like the water 

of a deep stream, love is always too much. We

did not make it. Though we drink till we burst

we cannot have it all, or want it all.

In its abundance it survives our thirst.

In the evening we come down to the shore 

to drink our fill, and sleep, while it 

flows through the regions of the dark.

It does not hold us, except we keep returning

to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,

willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

7.

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,

containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.

I give you the life I have let live for love of you:

a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,

the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life

that we have planted in this ground, as I

have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all

beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself

again and again, and satisfy—and this poem,

no more mine than any man's who has loved a woman.

---

Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage (1973) (excerpted) (the rest is lovely too)