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Column 425

The Vacation

Intro by Ted Kooser
05.12.2013

If we haven’t done it our­selves, we’ve known peo­ple who have, it seems: tak­en a vaca­tion most­ly to pho­to­graph a vaca­tion, not real­ly look­ing at what’s there, but see­ing every­thing through the viewfind­er with the idea of look­ing at it when they get home. Wen­dell Berry of Ken­tucky, one of our most dis­tin­guished poets, cap­tures this perfectly.

The Vacation

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat
with his video camera to his eye, making
a moving picture of the moving river
upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly
toward the end of his vacation. He showed
his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,
preserving it forever: the river, the trees,
the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat
behind which he stood with his camera
preserving his vacation even as he was having it
so that after he had had it he would still
have it. It would be there. With a flick
of a switch, there it would be. But he
would not be in it. He would never be in it.

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Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2012 by Wendell Berry, whose most recent book of poems is New Collected Poems, Counterpoint, 2012. Poem reprinted from New Collected Poems, Counterpoint, 2012, and used with permission of Wendell Berry and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.