Gravelly Run poem – A. R. Ammons poems | Poetry Monster
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:
no use to make any philosophies here: I see no god in the holly, hear no song from the 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.
Archie Randolph Ammons (1926-2001) was an important American poet, a modern classic, Ammons wrote about ourrelationship to nature in a way that is both comic and solemn. His poems often addressreligious and philosophical matters and scenes involving nature in a manner that is almost transcendental.
