Solace, the Dark Seed
sexy poems part three
Solace In The Dark Seed
Sexy Poems part 3
Foreword: Sorry the last post was so dreadfully didactic! My intention for these reflective essays is to draw out themes in a way that rustles up some open-ended curiosity.
***
Next up, Wendell Berry!
I know everyone is obsessed with him. Disclaimer: Not claiming to be an expert, I have only read his verse and Hannah Coulter.
Aside: As I write this series, I am beginning to feel vastly underqualified. The irony is not lost on me that I have been married only three years and here I am attempting… attempting what? Feeble reflections on a treasury of poems, scattered musings on maturing love, each a prayer pebble to roll under the tongue…
***
“I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.”
—W. Berry
Have you ever heard of a “patience bottle”?
https://laughingsquid.com/building-ships-in-bottles/
Feeling 100% Intimidated and inspired by these folks who spend hours building intricate battleships inside glass bottles.
It must require a lot of patience.
What do you think?
***
Vascular comes from vessel,
Majestic watercraft,
Bouquet’s vase,
A sacred banquet,
A fragrant nosegay!
A copper drinking bowl,
Secret hip flask,
A flagon of sparkling ale,
Honeyed mead, its
Electric
Braided fibers
Plaited around the patience bottle,
A sacred cask of wine.
This is making me thirsty.
***
“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”
~*~
Commonwealth of Joy
Love has inscribed living prints all over creation, since Love creates and sustains us. We have been created with more intricacy and patience than a ship in a bottle! Berry’s poem argues that his marriage is written in the land. He also extends this metaphor to our bodies.
“under his feet”
“moving in his blood”
Let’s take a second to marvel at the intricacies of our bodies! God is astonishing us all the time! Like, what’s up with the heart? Though the emoji has two parts in equal symmetry and the organ it represents does have two sides (left and right), they are not symmetrical. The heart is divided into four chambers that are not quite identical in shape or function.
We cannot dissect the soul, but if we could, I am sure we would have some parallels with the heart. It has an inner space which comes alive with air and warmth when there is blood.
Now I am fully aware I am taking a mighty-fine liberty here, but Berry’s image of the sleeping seed reminds me of this:
Question: Is this a hummingbird?
(Image Source: Smithsonian Magazine article published April 2026!)
~*~
Latch-Key Girl
She is in the darkness,
Internal and
Nocturnal
You can only see her
If we make her glow.
Peacefully
The seed grows and spreads—
Roots deepen,
Searching for rain,
Branching out
Transforming tongues of
Flame,
Tongues of fire lick the
Bulbs
Swelling with blood
A stem rising
Out of the humus
Bearing fruit, a
Delectable
Berry!
~*~
“My beloved put his hand to the latch,
and my heart was thrilled within me.”
Song of Solomon 5:4
🌹
Introducing…
The never before photographed…
The elusive and pervasive and crazy…
kleitorís!
(Here she looks like a firefly!)
Song of Solomon 5:5
“I arose to open to my beloved,
and my hands dripped with myrrh,
my fingers with liquid myrrh,
on the handles of the bolt.”
***
She is 3-4 inches of tender tissue. More nerve endings than any organ in any human— male or female. I’ll say it again: more than six times the amount of nerve! So like triple-triple (sextiple??) more than male counterparts. That’s over 10,000 in one wee firefly! Like “way more sensitive”, if like me you don’t get numbers.
She deserves a poem. Doncha think?
***
kleitorís (κλειτορίς)
Roots in Ancient Greek
kleitys (κλιτύς)
Meaning little mound,
kleis (κλείς) is
Latch or key
The clitoral roots
Buried deep,
Cradled by
Four fornices:
The front, back, left, and
Right—
These surround the sensitive
Crest with richly
Decorated
Innervated pockets.
Rings and vaults and arches!
Folded frost-flowers,
Thawing, melting,
Inner chambers
Of delight!
*
*
*
*
“This comes after silence.
Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing.
And then there rose in me,
like the earth’s empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed.
I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood…”
—WB
***
So his sleep-seed is in her body, where it is deep and dark and moist. The night-soil is fresh and soft and warm. The earth’s empowering brew is rising in his body. She is moving in his blood.
“I rest in peace in you, when I arrive at last.”
Wow, Wendell.
Berry’s wife is his home, she is his native land. A country made up of tangled roots and thickets, of birds singing at night. All these components make a marriage. A marriage is not a stagnant object to be studied, but a world to be explored and soil to be tended. Dynamic, deep and astonishingly beautiful. Tender, mysterious and sensitive. His succor is this singular person. Their common delight and pleasure is his solace. The everlasting bond of marriage is his comfort in the darkness.
Can any of us say the same?
Why do we bother striving and struggling and wandering? Why do we waste so much energy evaluating and analyzing and over-thinking? Haha now here I am over-thinking.
Why can’t we just…
“…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”
—WB
Snaps!
This might be the sexiest poem ever written.
Go read ‘Country of Marriage’ right now.
❤️
