By A. R. Ammons
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.
Source: Poetry (September 2017)
Poet Bio
The wonderfully varied poetry of A. R. Ammons reflects his lifelong interest in science; landscapes, animals, biological processes, and even the weather typically provide the raw materials for his philosophical meditations. An heir of the American transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, who sought in nature clues to an ultimate metaphysical reality, he also has affinities with Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. A self-deprecating, countrified humor marks both his short, personal lyrics and experimental longer poems. One longer poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year, was written entirely on adding-machine tape.
More By This Poet
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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...
Glass
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.
More Poems about Living
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You got that clean waistcoat,
the bright white of a well-tailored
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to tilt that hat like you own
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We are all ventricle, spine, lung, larynx, and gut.
Clavicle and nape, what lies forked in an open palm;
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and tongue. We are wishbone and gland and molar
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More Poems about Love
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It’s true: I almost never
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I’m not in love: my heart
is that black violin
played slowly. You know that
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when the voice
is so pure you feel
the blood in it: the wound
between rage
and complete surrender. That’s
where...
Sunshower
Some people say the devil is beating
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More Poems about Nature
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We are all ventricle, spine, lung, larynx, and gut.
Clavicle and nape, what lies forked in an open palm;
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and tongue. We are wishbone and gland and molar
and...
White Box
Of Tribulation, these are They,
Denoted by the White.
— Emily Dickinson
Pained, permanent
wakefulness
Exposed
in the split geode
a Santa’s grotto
Jagged milk
quartz crusts
constitute
every surface —
a mouth
all teeth
self-sharpening
like sea urchins’ —
“Uncomfortably beautiful”
toughened glass
spikes
in the doorways
of award-
winning offices
— rough
sleepers from the womb
condemned
to make of anything succulent
rock
of porticoes
iron maidens