Arts & Sciences

Newsletter
Fall 1998 Vol. 20 No. 1

A.R.Ammons

Storm Branches broken, the clean meat at the branch knot turned out white, traveled by cleared white light: certain consequences are irreversible, arrangements lost to death's and black's scavenging the sweet grain: well but weakness went sacrificed to the wind and the trees, clarified, compress rootstrength into remaining flesh and the leaves that shake in the aftermath shake in a safe, tested place.	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. Utensil How does the pot pray: wash me, so I gleam? prays, crack my enamel: let the rust in.	Runoff By the highway the stream downslope could hardly clear itself through rubbish and slime but by that resistance gained a cutting depth equal to its breadth and so had means to muscle into ripples and spill over angled shelves: and so went on down in a long curve, responsively slow to the sizable ridge it tended and farther on down, quiet and clear, never tipping enough to break sound, slowed into marshy landrise and burst into a bog of lupine and mirrored: that was a place! What a place! the soggy small marsh, nutgrass and swordweed!
	From Selected Poems, by A.R.Ammons (New York: W.W.Norton&Co. 1987). Reprinted by permission.