A. R. Ammons: “Gravelly Run”

A winter’s dream, © by MagicAttic88

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,
and the cedars’ gothic-clustered
   spires could make
green religion in winter bones:

so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass
jail seals each thing in its entity:

no use to make any philosophies here:
   I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
   unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.
–A. R. Ammons

A. R. Ammons: from Garbage

garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual, believable enough 
 
to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and 

creamy white:  what else deflects us from the
errors of our illusionary ways, not a temptation
 
to trashlessness, that is too far off, and,
anyway, unimaginable, unrealistic

–A. R. Ammons

Photo:  The Persistence of Garbage by Giant Ginkgo

A. R. Ammons: from “Ommateum”

from OMMATEUM
In the wind my rescue is
in whorls of it
      like winged tufts of dreams
bearing
   through the forms of nothingness
   the gyres and hurricane eyes
the seed safety
      of multiple origins

–A.R. Ammons

(from Canto 26)

Photo: Wind-blown shores by p medved