A. R. Ammons

Did wind and wave design the albatross's wing, honed compliances: or is it effrontery to suggest that the wing designed the gales and seas: are we guests here, then, with all the gratitude and soft-walking of the guest: provisions and endurances of riverbeds, mountain shoulders, windings through of tulip poplar, grass, and sweet-frosted foxgrape: are we to come into these and leave them as they are: are the rivers in us, and the slopes, ours that the world's imitate, or are we mirrorments merely of a high designing aloof and generous as a host to us: what would become of us if we declined and staked out a level affirmation of our own: we wind the brook into our settlement and husband the wind to our sails and blades: what is to be grateful when let alone to itself, as for a holiday in naturalness: the albatross, ah, fishes the waves with a will beyond the waves' will, and we, to our own doings, put down the rising of sea or mountain slope: except we do not finally put it down: still, till the host appears, we'll make the masters here.

I wonder if I know enough to know what it’s really like to have been here: have I seen sights enough to give seeing over: the clouds, I’ve waited with white October clouds like these this afternoon often before and taken them in, but white clouds shade other white ones gray, had I noticed that: and though I’ve followed the leaves of many falls, have I spent time with the wire vines left when frost’s red dyes strip the leaves away: is more missing than was never enough: I’m sure many of love’s kinds absolve and heal, but were they passing rapids or welling stirs: I suppose I haven’t done and seen enough yet to go, and, anyway, it may be way on on the way before one picks up the track of the sufficient, the world-round reach, spirit deep, easing and all, not just mind answering itself but mind and things apprehended at once as one, all giving all way, not a scrap of question holding back.

Praying answers prayer: in the deep spells of inquiry and hope, a self enabled to rise again to the compromises and the shattering caring forms

Taking root in windy sand is not an easy way to go about finding a place to stay. A ditchbank or wood's-edge has firmer ground. In a loose world though something can be started— a root touch water, a tip break sand— Mounds from that can rise on held mounds, a gesture of building, keeping, a trapping into shape. Firm ground is not available ground.

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: as 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.

Coming to Sumer and the tamarisks on the river I Ezra with unsettling love rifled the mud and wattle huts for recent mournings with gold leaves and lapis lazuli beads in the neat braids loosening from the skull Looking through the wattles to the sun I said It has rained some here in this place unless snow falls heavily in the hills to do this The floor was smooth with silt and river weeds hanging gray on the bent reeds spoke saying Everything is even here as you can see Firing the huts I abandoned the unprofitable poor unequal even in the bone to disrespect and casual with certainty watched an eagle wing as I went to king and priest