A Global Thing a Local Way

A Global Thing a Local Way:

Two Poems

First Poem By Wendell Berry

There is a day

when the road neither comes nor goes

and the way is not a way

but a place.

Second Poem by Zack Eswine

Not knowing the names of trees

i walk among them.

The rustle of leaves giving space for wind,

offering place for rest,

making its case for home.

I, resisting,

Stare—

at them,

through them,

beyond them,

restless in my own progress.

Flesh and leaf,

the rootless and the rooted.

Unlike my people,

who have long known the names of trees

I, like a distant cousin

or pitied friend must attend

this family reunion

to which I am strange.

Strange because Eden’s familiarity

was snatched from the open

palms of the firstborn grandchild.

Or was it that my palms were dressed by fists

on the morning of school’s first day?

No matter, I have long outrun tables where

stories lived easy in the bodied rest

of conversation that spilled over into

“goodnight,” or “see you in the morning”—

Tilled over into sunrise hands and bloods

touching actual soils and roots.

Unaccustomed to this lingering

I am wrestled inward, exposed

amid a family of barks long surrendered to remaining.

Like the cool which illumines my breath

In snow-frosted woods

I see before my eyes a deep discontent.

It beckons a man to never be where he is.

I stare at the ground looking for roots.