Their Sex Life

One failure on
Top of another

A. R. Ammons

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A. R. Ammons

Gravelly Run

A. R. Ammons, Simple Poetry

Eyesight

A. R. Ammons, Simple Poetry

Poetics

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.

Weathering

A day without rain is like
a day without sunshine

A. R. Ammons

Greeting Verses

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


the question is not whether your life is at stake
but whether you can pay the bill, guaranteeing it on
admission (or no admission) and proving it (or not getting


out) on release (if any): this bit of realism
clutches our floating values underneath like a bracket
under a bouquet: if someone pauses to


congratulate me on some slight nothing, I see the
quiver of a curse undermine his lip: he
tries to make a better world even while it crumbles in


on him and us (a brutality): when I give my body to another
(or take anothers) I sometimes fear more
body being taken than was of...

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

Elegy For A Jet Pilot

The blast skims
over the string
of takeoff lights
and
relinquishing
place and time
lofts to
separation:
the plume, rose
sliver, grows
across the
high-lit evening
sky: by this
Mays Landing creek
shot pinecones,
skinned huckleberry
bush, laurel
swaths define
an unbelievably
particular stop.

A. R. Ammons

Small Song

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

A. R. Ammons

The Confirmers

The saints are gathering at the real
places, trying tough skin on sharp
conscience,
endurance in the hot spots-
searching out to define, come up
against, mouth
the bitterest bit:
you can hear them yelping
down in the dark greeny groves of
condemnation:
their lips slice back
with jittery suctions, cold
insweeps of conjured grief:
if they, footloose, wham up the
precise damnation,
consolation
may be more than us trudging
down from paunchy dinners,
swatting hallelujah arms at
dusk bugs and telling them pure
terror has obviously made them
earnest of mind and of motion lithe.

A. R. Ammons