Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Poet(s) of the Week: Richard Wilbur (1921- ) and A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Poet(s) of the Week: Richard Wilbur (1921- ) and A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)


Poet(s) of the Week: Richard Wilbur (1921- )


Poet(s) of the Week: Richard Wilbur (1921- )

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Richard Wilbur (1921- )

The Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like liliesOn water; it glidesSo from the walker, it turnsDry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it; As a mantis, arrangedOn a green leaf, growsInto it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says They are not only yours; the beautiful changes In such kind ways, Wishing ever to sunderThings and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.


Advice to a Prophet

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,Not proclaiming our fall but begging usIn God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,The long numbers that rocket the mind;Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.How should we dream of this place without us?--The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceiveOf an undreamt thing, we know to our costHow the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,How the view alters. We could believe,

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If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slipInto perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burnAs Xanthus once, its gliding troutStunned in a twinkling. What should we be withoutThe dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?Ask us, prophet, how we shall callOur natures forth when that live tongue is allDispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the cleanHorse of our courage, in which beheldThe singing locust of the soul unshelled,And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless roseOur hearts shall fail us; come demandingWhether there shall be lofty or long standingWhen the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

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Death of a Toad

A toad the power mower caught,Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has gotTo the garden verge, and sanctuaried himUnder the cineraria leaves, in the shadeOf the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,Low, and a final glade.

The rare original heartsblood goes,Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flowsIn the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He liesAs still as if he would return to stone,And soundlessly attending, diesToward some deep monotone,

Toward misted and ebullient seasAnd cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies.Day dwindles, drowning and at length is goneIn the wide and antique eyes, which still appearTo watch, across the castrate lawn,The haggard daylight steer.


Ceremony

A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille Is, you may say, a patroness of boughs Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin. But ceremony never did conceal,Save to the silly eye, which all allows,How much we are the woods we wander in.

Let her be some Sabrina fresh from stream,Lucent as shallows slowed by wading sun,Bedded on fern, the flowers’ cynosure:Then nymph and wood must nod and strive to dream That she is airy earth, the trees, undone,Must ape her languor natural and pure.

Ho-hum. I am for wit and wakefulness, And love this feigning lady by Bazille. What's lightly hid is deepest understood, And when with social smile and formal dress She teaches leaves to curtsey and quadrille, I think there are most tigers in the wood.


Still, Citizen Sparrow

Still, citizen sparrow, this vulture which you call Unnatural, let him but lumber again to air Over the rotten office, let him bearThe carrion ballast up, and at the tall

Tip of the sky lie cruising. Then you’ll seeThat no more beautiful bird is in heaven’s height, No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight; He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free,

The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you Who dart in the orchard aisles, for it is he Devours death, mocks mutability,Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.

Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget How for so many bedlam hours his saw Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw, And the slam of his hammer all the day beset

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The people’s ears. Forget that he could bear To see the towns like coral under the keel,And the fields so dismal deep. Try rather to feel How high and weary it was, on the waters where

He rocked his only world, and everyone’s. Forgive the hero, you who would have died Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide To Ararat; all men are Noah’s sons.

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Barred Owl

The warping night air having brought the boomOf an owl’s voice into her darkened room,We tell the wakened child that all she heardWas an odd question from a forest bird,Asking of us, if rightly listened to,“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,Can also thus domesticate a fear,And send a small child back to sleep at nightNot listening for the sound of stealthy flightOr dreaming of some small thing in a clawBorne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.


Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses, Some are in smocks: but truly there they are. Now they are rising together in calm swells Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveyingThe terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving And staying like white water; and now of a sudden They swoon down into so rapt a quietThat nobody seems to be there. The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,And cries, “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steamAnd clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledgesWith a warm look the world’s hunks and colors, The soul descends once more in bitter love To accept the waking body, saying nowIn a changed voice as the man yawns and rises, “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves; Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone, And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating Of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance.”


Lying

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.Your reputation for saying things of interestWill not be marred, if you hasten to other topics,Nor will the delicate web of human trustBe ruptured by that airy fabrication.Later, however, talking with toxic zestOf golf, or taxes, or the rest of itWhere the beaked ladle plies the chuckling ice,You may enjoy a chill of severance, hearingAbove your head the shrug of unreal wings.Not that the world is tiresome in itself:We know what boredom is: it is a dullImpatience or a fierce velleity,A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude,To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,We invent nothing, merely bearing witnessTo what each morning brings again to light:Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment

Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural lawSpins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,Then grass and grackles or, at the end of townIn sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neckClothed with its usual thunder, and the stonesBeginning now to tug their shadows inAnd track the air with glitter. All these thingsAre there before us; there before we lookOr fail to look; there to be seen or notBy us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes,According to our means and purposes.So too with strangeness not to be ignored,Total eclipse or snow upon the rose,And so with that most rare conception, nothing.

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What is it, after all, but something missed?It is the water of a dried-up wellGone to assail the cliffs of Labrador.There is what galled the arch-negator, sprungFrom Hell to probe with intellectual sightThe cells and heavens of a given worldWhich he could take but as another prison:Small wonder that, pretending not to be,He drifted through the bar-like boles of EdenIn a black mist low creeping, dragging downAnd darkening with moody self-absorptionWhat, when he left it, lifted and, if seenFrom the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues.Closer to making than the deftest fraudIs seeing how the catbird’s tail was madeTo counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray,Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still,How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushedTo one side on a backlit chopping-boardAnd rocked by trifling currents, prints and printsIts bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail.Odd that a thing is most itself when likened:

The eye mists over, basil hints of clove,The river glazes toward the dam and spillsTo the drubbed rocks below its crashing cullet,And in the barnyard near the sawdust-pileSome great thing is tormented. Either it isA tarp torn loose and in the groaning windNow puffed, now flattened, or a hip-shot beastWhich tries again, and once again, to rise.What, though for pain there is no other word,Finds pleasure in the cruellest simile?It is something in us like the catbird’s songFrom neighbor bushes in the grey of morningThat, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord,Proclaims its many kin. It is a chant

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Of the first springs, and it is tributaryTo the great lies told with the eyes half-shutThat have the truth in view: the tale of ChironWho, with sage head, wild heart, and planted hoofInstructed brute Achilles in the lyre,Or of the garden where we first mislaidSimplicity of wish and will, forgettingOut of what cognate splendor all things cameTo take their scattering names; and nonethelessThat matter of a baggage-train surprisedBy a few Gascons in the PyreneesWhich, having worked three centuries and moreIn the dark caves of France, poured out at lastThe blood of Roland, who to Charles his kingAnd to the dove that hatched the dove-tailed worldWas faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.

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A Barred Owl

The warping night air having brought the boomOf an owl’s voice into her darkened room,We tell the wakened child that all she heardWas an odd question from a forest bird,Asking of us, if rightly listened to,“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,Can also thus domesticate a fear,And send a small child back to sleep at nightNot listening for the sound of stealthy flightOr dreaming of some small thing in a clawBorne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.


Richard Wilbur (1921- )


Poet(s) of the Week: A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)


Poet(s) of the Week: A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)

Poetics

I look for the waythings will turnout spiralling from a center,the shapethings will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree whitetouched black at brancheswill stand outwind-glitteringtotally its apparent self:

I look for the formsthings want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,how a thing willunfold:

not the shape on paper -- thoughthat, too -- but theuninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shapeas being availableto any shape that may besummoning itselfthrough mefrom the self not mine but ours.


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.


Recovery

All afternoonthe tree shadows, accelerating,lengthenedtillsunsetshot them black into infinity:next morningdarknessreturned from the otherinfinity and theshadows caught groundand through the morning, slowing,hardened into noon.


Rivulose

You think the ridge hills flowing, breakingwith ups and downs will, though,building constancy into the black foreground

for each sunset, hold on to you, if dreamswander, give reality recurrence enough to keepan image clear, but then you realize, time

going on, that time's residual like the lastice age's cool still in the rocks, averagedmaybe with the cool of the age before, that

not only are you not being held onto but whereelse could time do so well without you,what is your time where so much time is saved?


I said what is more lowly than the grass:ah, underneath,a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:I looked at it closelyand said this can be my habitat: butnestling in Ifoundbelow the brown exteriorgreen mechanisms beyond the intellectawaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:I found a beggar:he had stumps for legs: nobody was payinghim any attention: everybody went on by:I nestled in and found his life:there, love shook his body like a devastation:I saidthough I have looked everywhereI can find nothing lowlyin the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,stood in wonder:moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificentwith being!


Small Song

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


A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)

The City Limits

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withholditself but pours its abundance without selection into everynook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light butlie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you considerthe radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you considerthe abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumpedguts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in noway winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,each is accepted into as much light as it will take, thenthe heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the darkwork of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushesand fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.


The Confirmers

The saints are gathering at the realplaces, trying tough skin on sharpconscience,endurance in the hot spots-searching out to define, come upagainst, mouththe bitterest bit:you can hear them yelpingdown in the dark greeny groves ofcondemnation:their lips slice back with jittery suctions, coldinsweeps of conjured grief:if they, footloose, wham up theprecise damnation,consolationmay be more than us trudgingdown from paunchy dinners,swatting hallelujah arms atdusk bugs and telling them pureterror has obviously made themearnest of mind and of motion lithe.


A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)

Viable

Motion's the dead giveaway,eye catcher, the revealing risk:the caterpillar sulls on the hot macadam

but then, risking, ripples to the bush:the cricket, startled, leaps thequickest arc: the earthwrom, casting,

nudges a grassblade, and the sharp robinstrikes: sound's the otherannouncement: the redbird lands in

an elm branch and tests the air withcheeps for an answering, reassuringcheep, for a motion already cleared:

survival organizes these means down totension, to enwrapped, twisting suasions:every act or non-act enceinte with risk or

prize: why must the revelations besound and motion, the point, too, moving andsaying through the scary opposites to death.


When I was Young the Silk

Autoplay next videoWhen I was young the silkof my mindhard as a peony headunfurledand wind bloomed the parachute:

The air-head tugged meup,tore my roots loose and drovehigh, so high

I want to touch down nowand taste the groundI want to take inmy silkand ask where I ambefore it is too late to know


A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)In View of the Fact

The people of my time are passing away: mywife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who

died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it’sRuth we care so much about in intensive care:

it was once weddings that came so thick andfast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:

now, it’s this that and the other and somebodyelse gone or on the brink: well, we never

thought we would live forever (although we did)and now it looks like we won’t: some of us

are losing a leg to diabetes, some don’t knowwhat they went downstairs for, some know that

a hired watchful person is around, some liketo touch the cane tip into something steady,

so nice: we have already lost so many,brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our

address books for so long a slow scramble noware palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our

index cards for Christmases, birthdays,Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

at the same time we are getting used to somany leaving, we are hanging on with a grip

to the ones left: we are not giving up on thecongestive heart failure or brain tumors, on

the nice old men left in empty houses or onthe widows who decide to travel a lot: we

think the sun may shine someday when we’lldrink wine together and think of what used to


be: until we die we will remember everysingle thing, recall every word, love every

loss: then we will, as we must, leave it toothers to love, love that can grow brighter

and deeper till the very end, gaining strengthand getting more precious all the way. . . .


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 alreadywritten 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, saymailboxes, or should I try to plumb what is

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

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

something going on: something besides thisdiddledeediddle everyday matter-of-fact: I

could draw up an ancient memory which wouldwipe this whole presence away: or I could fill

out my dreams with high syntheses turned intoconcrete visionary forms: Lucre could lust

for Luster: bad angels could roar out of perditionand kill the AIDS vaccine not quite

perfected yet: the gods could get down on each other; the big gods could fly in from

nebulae unknown: but I’m only me: I have 4interests--money, poetry, sex, death: I guess

I can jostle those. . . .


coiled and free in airs and oceans: water picks up mineral shadow and

plasm into billions of designs, frames: trees, grains, bacteria: but

is love a reality we made here ourselves--and grief--did we design that--or do these, like currents, whine in and out among us merely

as we arrive and go:this is just a place:the reality we agree with,

that agrees with us, outbounding this, arrives to touch, joining with

In Memoriam Mae Noblitt

This is just a place:we go around, distanced, yearly in a star’s

atmosphere, turning daily into and out of direct light and

slanting through the quadrant seasons: deep space begins at our

heels, nearly rousing us loose: we look up or out so high, sight’s

silk almost draws us away:this is just a place:currents worry themselves

us from far away:our home which defines us is elsewhere but not

so far away we have forgotten it:this is just a place.


Corsons Inlet

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morningto 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, bindsof thoughtinto the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight:

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I allow myself eddies of meaning: yield to a direction of significancerunninglike a stream through the geography of my work: you can findin 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 eventsI cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accountingbeyond the account:

in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of primrose more or less dispersed;disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rowsof dunes,irregular swamps of reeds,though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all ...predominantly reeds:

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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 sandchange the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape tomorrow,

so I am willing to go along, to accept the becomingthought, 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 rangethan mental lines can keep:

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the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low: black shoals of mussels exposed to the riskof airand, 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 ateto vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab, picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddyturnstone running in to snatch leftover bits:

risk is full: every living thing insiege: the demand is life, to keep life: the smallwhite 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? 4


the news to my left over the dunes andreeds and bayberry clumps was fall: thousands of tree swallows gathering for flight: an order held in constant change: a congregationrich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable as one event, not chaos: preparations forflight from winter,cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps,beaksat the bayberries a perception full of wind, flight, curve, sound: the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:the “field” of actionwith moving, incalculable center:

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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 membranesto strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, nolines 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 swallowscould take flight—some other fields of bayberry could enter fall berryless) and there is serenity: 6


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 thatScope 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.

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A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)

Gravelly Run

I don’t know somehow it seems sufficientto see and hear whatever coming and going is,losing the self to the victory of stones and trees,of bending sandpit lakes, crescentround 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 itand death could never end it:

the swamp’s slow water comes down Gravelly Run fanning the long stone-held algalhair 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 makegreen religion in winter bones:

so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass jail seals each thing in its entity:

no use to make any philosophies here: I see nogod in the holly, hear no song fromthe snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never heard of trees: surrendered self among unwelcoming forms: stranger,hoist your burdens, get on down the road.


Swells

The very longest swell in the ocean, I suspect,carries the deepest memory, the information of actionssummarized (surface peaks and dibbles and local sharp

slopes of windstorms) with a summary of the summariesand under other summaries a deeper summary: well, maybedeeper, longer for length here is the same as deep

time: so that the longest swell swells least; thatis, its effects in immediate events are least perceptible,a pitch to white water rising say a millimeter more

because of an old invisible presence: and on the oceanfloor an average so vast occurs it moves in a noticeabilityof a thousand years, every blip, though, of surface and

intermediacy moderated into account: I like to goto old places where the effect dwells, summits or seasso hard to summon into mind, even with the natural


ones hard to climb or weigh: I go there in my mind(which is, after all, where these things negotiably are)and tune in to the wave nearly beyond rise or fall in its

staying and hum the constant, universal assimilation: theinformation, so packed, nearly silenced with majestyand communicating hardly any action: go there and

rest from the ragged and rapid pulse, the immediate threatshot up in a disintegrating spray, the many thoughts andsights unmanageable, the deaths of so many, hungry or mad.


Dunes

Taking root in windy sand is not an easywayto 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 trappinginto shape.

Firm ground is not available ground.


Documents

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Poet(s) of the Week: Richard Wilbur (1921- ) and A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)