A. R. Ammons

After yesterday afternoon's blue clouds and white rain

Walking is like imagination, a single step

Fall fell:    so that's it for the leaf poetry: some flurries have whitened the edges of roads and lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: &

After the event the rockslide realized, in a still diversity of completion,

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning to the sea, then turned right along

When the crow lands, the tip of the sprung spruce

The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time: ground up fine, I puff if a pebble stirs:

The drop seeps whole from boulder-lichen or ledge moss and drops,

I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished:

The blast skims over the string of takeoff lights

It was May before my attention came to spring and

I don't know somehow it seems sufficient to see and hear whatever coming and going is, losing the self to the victory

What do I find right at the center of my interpersonal relationships: a slightly dispersed but indisputably tinctured core of brutality: go to the hospital

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth and go on out over the sea marshes and the brant in bays and over the hills of tall hickory

1 An individual spider web identifies a species:

This is just a place: we go around, distanced, yearly in a star's

Silver will lie where she lies sun-out, whatever turning the world does, longeared in her ashen, earless,

I look for the way things will turn out spiralling from a center,

Fall's leaves are redder than spring's flowers, have no pollen, and also sometimes fly, as the wind

You think the ridge hills flowing, breaking with ups and downs will, though, building constancy into the black foreground

The reason to be autonomous is to stand there, a cleared instrument, ready to act, to search the moral realm and actual conditions for what

You'll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are: gosling shit (which J. Williams said something was as green as), fish shit (the generality), trout

The reeds give way to the wind and give the wind away.

So I said I am Ezra and the wind whipped my throat gaming for the sounds of my voice

I said I will find what is lowly and put the roots of my identity down there:

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

The saints are gathering at the real places, trying tough skin on sharp conscience,

One failure on Top of another

Motion's the dead giveaway, eye catcher, the revealing risk: the caterpillar sulls on the hot macadam

A day without rain is like a day without sunshine

When I was young the silk of my mind hard as a peony head