Keeping inventory

 I like Wendell Berry’s “Sabbath poems.” In one, the poet hears a bell in town, calling him to church. He hears, but walks into the woods to

            Take up a different story.

            I keep an inventory

            of wonders and uncommercial goods.

I wonder what makes Berry and poets of like mind write such poems. I wonder whether that impulse is hidden somewhere deep down in all of us. The lines came up on a long walk over one of the outcrops at Arabia Mountain.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997; Berkeley, Calif: Counterpoint Press, 1999. The lines are from “1979 IV.”