Design

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

joining, to trickle,
run, fall, dash,
sprawl in held deeps,

to rush shallows, spill
thin through heights,
but then, edging,

to eddy aside, nothing
of all but nothing's
curl of motion spent.

A. R. Ammons

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A. R. Ammons

The City Limits

A. R. Ammons, Simple Poetry

Cut The Grass

A. R. Ammons, Simple Poetry

Corsons Inlet

A. R. Ammons, Simple Poetry

Viable

A. R. Ammons, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

Corsons Inlet

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

A. R. Ammons

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:
...

A. R. Ammons

Rapids

Fall's leaves are redder than
spring's flowers, have no pollen,
and also sometimes fly, as the wind
schools them out or down in shoals
or droves: though I
have not been here long, I can
look up at the sky at night and tell
how things are likely to go for
the next hundred million years:
the universe will probably not find
a way to vanish nor I
in all that time reappear.

A. R. Ammons

Clarity

After the event the rockslide
realized,
in a still diversity of completion,
grain and fissure,
declivity
&
force of upheaval,
whether rain slippage,
ice crawl, root
explosion or
stream erosive undercut:

well I said it is a pity:
one swath of sight will never
be the same: nonetheless,
this
shambles has
relived a bind, a taut of twist,
revealing streaks &
scores of knowledge
now obvious and quiet.

A. R. Ammons

Called Into Play

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: &
turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going to

find something to write about I haven't already
written away: I will have to stop short, look

down, look up, look close, think, think, think:
but in what range should I think: should I

figure colors and outlines, given forms, say
mailboxes, or should I try to plumb what is

behind what and what behind that, deep down
where the surface has lost its semblance: or

should I think personally, such as, this week
seems to have been crafted in hell: what: is

something going on: something besides this
diddledeediddle everyday matter-of-fact: I

A. R. Ammons

Naiad Trance

    The leaves on their trumpet flames
    Richter scale inside pulse stems -
    into the gorge, la gorge
    throat and crevice
    of the canyon arroyo.

    Walking the slit
    into rheumatism earth
    the twilight pain
    of Paleozoic ice,
    Jurassic Age
    whence rupture
    sculpted rock

    River precipice
    the afternoon dangling like shadow
    beside taiga sun
    lost to dark & rain
    toward the water now,
    ever, and chemical rushing sound.

    Chameleon, I would swear
    this journey was that,
    worse, sorceress on my emotions;
    I left pathways contoured with Merlin rock
    & trees like Babbitt refugees
    from the Nahanni,
    fearful Dogrib aboriginals
   ...

Paul Cameron Brown