A. R. Ammons

time will wash away so clean not a cry will be left in it

The very longest swell in the ocean, I suspect, carries the deepest memory, the information of actions summarized (surface peaks and dibbles and local sharp slopes of windstorms) with a summary of the summaries and under other summaries a deeper summary: well, maybe deeper, longer for length here is the same as deep time: so that the longest swell swells least; that is, its effects in immediate events are least perceptible, a pitch to white water rising say a millimeter more because of an old invisible presence: and on the ocean floor an average so vast occurs it moves in a noticeability of a thousand years, every blip, though, of surface and intermediacy moderated into account: I like to go to old places where the effect dwells, summits or seas so hard to summon into mind, even with the natural ones hard to climb or weigh: I go there in my mind (which is, after all, where these things negotiably are) and tune in to the wave nearly beyond rise or fall in its staying and hum the constant, universal assimilation: the information, so packed, nearly silenced with majesty and communicating hardly any action: go there and rest from the ragged and rapid pulse, the immediate threat shot up in a disintegrating spray, the many thoughts and sights unmanageable, the deaths of so many, hungry or mad.

It doesn't matter to me if poems mean nothing: there's no floor to the universe and yet one walks the floor.

I found a weed that had a mirror in it and that mirror looked in at a mirror in me that had a weed in it

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree, morality: any working order, animate or inanimate: it has managed directed balance, the incoming and outgoing energies are working right, some energy left to the mechanism, some ash, enough energy held to maintain the order in repair, assure further consumption of entropy, expending energy to strengthen order: honor the persisting reactor, the container of change, the moderator: the yellow bird flashes black wing-bars in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay, startles the hawk with beauty, flitting to a branch where flash vanishes into stillness, hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight: honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics, the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies of control, the gastric transformations, seed dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge, blood compulsion, instinct: honor the unique genes, molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into sets, the nucleic grain transmitted in slow change through ages of rising and falling form, some cells set aside for the special work, mind or perception rising into orders of courtship, territorial rights, mind rising from the physical chemistries to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper racial satisfaction: heat kept by a feathered skin: the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen burner under the flask) so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and necessary worked out of random, reproducible, the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.

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 coiled and free in airs and oceans: water picks up mineral shadow and plasm into billions of designs, frames: trees, grains, bacteria: but is love a reality we made here ourselves— and grief—did we design that—or do these, like currents, whine in and out among us merely as we arrive and go: this is just a place: the reality we agree with, that agrees with us, outbounding this, arrives to touch, joining with us from far away: our home which defines us is elsewhere but not so far away we have forgotten it: this is just a place.

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 and over the crater lakes and canyons and on up through the spheres of diminishing air past the blackset noctilucent clouds where one wants to stop and look way past all the light diffusions and bombardments up farther than the loss of sight into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest coelenterates and praying for a nerve cell with all the soul of my chemical reactions and going right on down where the eye sees only traces You are everywhere partial and entire You are on the inside of everything and on the outside I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down and if I find you I must go out deep into your far resolutions and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

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.

The song sparrow puts all his saying into one repeated song: what variations, subtleties he manages, to encompass denser meanings, I’m too coarse to catch: it’s one song, an over-reach from which all possibilities, like filaments, depend: killing, nesting, dying, sun or cloud, figure up and become song—simple, hard: removed.

Such a long time as the wave idling gathers lofts and presses forward into the curvature of the height before one realizes that the tension completes itself with a fall through air, disorganization the prelude to the meandering of another gather and hurl, the necessary: ah, what can one make to absorb the astonishment: you should have seen me the merchant at market this morning: the people ogled me with severe goggles: maids, buying in manners and measures beyond themselves, stared into my goods and then grew horror-eyed: wives still as distant from day as a carrot from dinner took the misconnection sagely, a usual patience: peashells, I said, long silky peashells: cobs, I said, long cobs: husks and shucks, I said: one concerned person pointed out that my whole economy was wrong; yes, I said, but I have nothing else to sell: and I said to her, won't you appreciate the silky beds where seeds have lain: she had not come to that: and how about this residence all the grains have left: won't you buy it and think about it: not for dinner, she said: rinds, I cried, rinds and peelings: there was some interest in those, as for a marmalade, but no one willing, finally, to do the preparations: absurd, one woman shouted, and then I grew serious: can you do with that: but she was off before we fully met: you should have seen me the merchant at market this morning: will bankruptcy make a go of it: will the leavings be left only: the wave turns over and does not rise again, that wave.