Not Again in This Flesh

When I visited the Berrys at their farm in 2012, I thought I had come prepared for everything. I had duplicate copies of the poems that Wendell had agreed to read. I had two different audio recording devices in case one failed. But after reading “A gracious Sabbath stood here while they stood…,” Wendell caught me off guard. “How are they going to know who they are?” he asked, referring to the “they” mentioned in the first line and throughout the poem he had just read. I shrugged. I hadn’t ever paid attention to that detail; I just loved the words and was acting on the music I heard in the text. He clarified that the subject of the poem was introduced in the poem that preceded it chronologically, and so he found his own copy of A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 and graciously read “Not again in this flesh will I see,” numbered “1985, I” in the Sabbath poems sequence.  This experience was a gift, though it took me several years for the creative clarity to manifest itself. A