It’s been a rainy rentrée here in Paris, a stark contrast to the scorching weekend I spent in Italy. Luckily it’s good weather for writing.
This week I’ve been traveling in my mind to the states, where my novel takes place. For our salon, I’d like to discuss Wendell Berry’s poem “They Sit Together on the Porch” from his collection A Timbered Choir (1998).
You can read the poem here in Poetry Magazine.
If someone were to ask me how to describe growing up in rural Pennsylvania, the word “porch” would probably be among the first out of my mouth. Porch culture is a pillar of community in certain regions of the United States. In my childhood, the porch was one of the few places without a television; entertainment was watching the cars or people passing by, waving at those we knew, observing the plants decorating the space and the birds coming to the feeder, occasional conversation.
Many Americans are very attached to their homes. At the threshold between inside and out, the porch offers the comfort of home with a feeling of safe interaction with the outside world. It’s a complex setting.
In “They Sit Together on the Porch,” the idea of the porch as a liminal space is stretched to the one between life and death. The poem describes an older couple sitting on their porch, alone together, after all their work is done. They have lived a life together for so long they share a mind; they are so intimate that when they speak to each other, they say what they know the other knows.
The only thing the couple’s shared mind does not know is:
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.
Berry’s final metaphor is perfect: even in relationships of the deepest familiarity, there is always an unknown. This is one of the joys and anxieties of a shared life.
The contrast between the simplicity of the language and the complexity of the content in this poem give it a great American flavor. The plain word “dark” is repeated three times. It ends the first two lines of the poem like a shadow, making “dark” quite literally descend onto the text as well as the world the text projects.
In the fourth line, the word “only” carries a multitude of story, placed before six repetitions of the word “two”:
The dishes—only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons—small work for two.
In just one word, we understand that this couple was once surrounded by other people; children, perhaps, or other family or community members.
The repetition of this number led me to think about the poem mathematically. There are one hundred twelve words in the poem, the majority of which (ninety-four) are one syllable long. Only fifteen words are two syllables, and just three are three syllables. These lengths may correspond to the people in the house tapering off bit by bit. As its ending suggests, soon there will only be one person sitting on the porch alone.
In spite of all its reflections on death, darkness, and being alone, the poem does not read as an entirely depressing one to me. Here again the simplicity of the language may play a role: instead of dramatizing the end of life, the poem states its occurrence as fact, plain and simple. There is a quietness to the poem that reminds me of sitting on a porch, an odd state between waiting for something to happen or retiring inside.
In some ways, the café terrasses of Paris remind me of Pennsylvania porches. In both places, we watch people pass by, talk, sip a cold drink, and slow down.
Tomorrow is my husband’s and my two-year wedding anniversary. As Wendell Berry’s poem suggests, marriage is a mix of time, work, mystery, and intimacy. I’m feeling lucky to have someone to sit on the porch with, as we did this weekend on a terrasse of our beloved neighborhood.
This week I’ll be finishing a chapter draft to kick off a fall full of writing. If you’re looking for a beautiful setting to get some creative work done yourself, we still have space available at our La Muse Hosted Retreat at the end of October.
And speaking of La Muse, one of our talented summer Musers Margaret Kamitsuka has just released her book Desirable Belief: A Theology of Eros. Order a copy and find out more here.
à la prochaine !
Rachel