Small Song
The reeds give way to the wind
and give the wind away.
Submitted by Jim McCarthy
poem by Archie Randolph Ammons
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Design
The drop seeps whole
from boulder-lichen
or ledge moss and drops,
joining, to trickle,
run, fall, dash,
sprawl in held deeps,
to rush shallows, spill
thin through heights,
but then, edging,
to eddy aside, nothing
of all but nothing's
curl of motion spent.
poem by Archie Randolph Ammons
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Eyesight
It was May before my
attention came
to spring and
my word I said
to the southern slopes
I've
missed it, it
came and went before
I got right to see:
don't worry, said the mountain,
try the later northern slopes
or if
you can climb, climb
into spring: but
said the mountain
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poem by Archie Randolph Ammons
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Rivulose
You think the ridge hills flowing, breaking
with ups and downs will, though,
building constancy into the black foreground
for each sunset, hold on to you, if dreams
wander, give reality recurrence enough to keep
an image clear, but then you realize, time
going on, that time's residual like the last
ice age's cool still in the rocks, averaged
maybe with the cool of the age before, that
not only are you not being held onto but where
else could time do so well without you,
what is your time where so much time is saved?
poem by Archie Randolph Ammons
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Poetics
I look for the way
things will turn
out spiralling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in
so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:
I look for the forms
things want to come as
from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:
not the shape on paper -- though
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poem by Archie Randolph Ammons
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Autonomy
I am living without you because
of a terror, a farfetched
notion that I
can't live without you
which I must narrow down & quell,
for how can I live
worthy of you, in the
freedom of you limber engagements,
in the casual uptakes of your
sweetest compliances
if stricken in your presence
by what your absence stills:
to have you, I school myself
to let you go; how terrible
to buy that absence
before the fragrance of any presence comes:
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poem by Archie Randolph Ammons
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In Memoriam Mae Noblitt
This is just a place:
we go around, distanced,
yearly in a star's
atmosphere, turning
daily into and out of
direct light and
slanting through the
quadrant seasons: deep
space begins at our
heels, nearly rousing
us loose: we look up
or out so high, sight's
silk almost draws us away:
this is just a place:
currents worry themselves
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poem by Archie Randolph Ammons
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An Improvisation For Angular Momentum
Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
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poem by Archie Randolph Ammons
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Gravelly Run
I don't know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:
for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:
the swamp's slow water comes
down Gravelly Run fanning the long
stone-held algal
hair and narrowing roils between
the shoulders of the highway bridge:
holly grows on the banks in the woods there,
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poem by Archie Randolph Ammons
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The City Limits
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue
bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
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poem by Archie Randolph Ammons
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