free-verse128 lines

Corsons Inlet

by A. R. Ammons

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning

to the sea,

then turned right along

the surf

rounded a naked headland

and returned

along the inlet shore:

it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,

crisp in the running sand,

some breakthroughs of sun

but after a bit

continuous overcast:

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,

from the perpendiculars,

straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds

of thought

into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends

of sight:

I allow myself eddies of meaning:

yield to a direction of significance

running

like a stream through the geography of my work:

you can find

in my sayings

swerves of action

like the inlet's cutting edge:

there are dunes of motion,

organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance

in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:

but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events

I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting

beyond the account:

in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of

primrose

more or less dispersed;

disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows

of dunes,

irregular swamps of reeds,

though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all ...

predominantly reeds:

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,

shutting out and shutting in, separating inside

from outside: I have

drawn no lines:

manifold events of sand

change the dune's shape that will not be the same shape

tomorrow,

so I am willing to go along, to accept

the becoming

thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish

no walls:

by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek

to undercreek: but there are no lines, though

change in that transition is clear

as any sharpness: but 'sharpness' spread out,

allowed to occur over a wider range

than mental lines can keep:

the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:

black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk

of air

and, earlier, of sun,

waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,

caught always in the event of change:

a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals

and ate

to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,

picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy

turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits:

risk is full: every living thing in

siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small

white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears

the shallows, darts to shore

to stab'what? I couldn't

see against the black mudflats'a frightened

fiddler crab?

the news to my left over the dunes and

reeds and bayberry clumps was

fall: thousands of tree swallows

gathering for flight:

an order held

in constant change: a congregation

rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable

as one event,

not chaos: preparations for

flight from winter,

cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps,

beaks

at the bayberries

a perception full of wind, flight, curve,

sound:

the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:

the 'field' of action

with moving, incalculable center:

in the smaller view, order tight with shape:

blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:

snail shell:

pulsations of order

in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,

broken down, transferred through membranes

to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no

lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together

and against, of millions of events: this,

so that I make

no form of

formlessness:

orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override

or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain

the top of a dune,

the swallows

could take flight'some other fields of bayberry

could enter fall

berryless) and there is serenity:

no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,

or thought:

no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities

of escape open: no route shut, except in

the sudden loss of all routes:

I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will

not run to that easy victory:

still around the looser, wider forces work:

I will try

to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening

scope, but enjoying the freedom that

Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,

that I have perceived nothing completely,

that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.