GULP AIR AND SHOUT!
When does the person who writes poems become a poet? How does ministry to dead things – meter, slant rhyme, caesurae, enjambment – draw breath on the page? How to clothe with flesh those dry syllabic bones?
Beats me, but I do desire it.
I lust for the warm flesh of an image impossible to resist. A stanza that gulps air and shouts, cries, laughs. Just a couple of perfect lines that when anyone reads them they have to whisper, “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.”
Here’s the closing stanza of my favorite poem, Hymn by A.R.Ammons. In the preceding stanzas we’ve been transported ” . . . past the blackset noctilucent clouds . . . up farther than the loss of sight,” and then encountered “sporangia and simplest coelenterates . . . going right on down where the eye sees only traces.” Now Ammons bring us home:
I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves
I can feel these images drawing me deep into the bark, the sap, the separate leaves. There’s science and biology, and then there is the spiritual connection that gives them meaning — my ant-soul the shout, the cry, the laugh. Earth and sky. Cell and organism.
The separate leaves.
[This was my first GriffinPoetry post, on March 31, 2011 — below is the full poem by A. R. Ammons . . .
. . . and each post since the very first concludes with an image of this tree, an elm on the bald summit at Bluff Ridge, Doughton Park, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina, USA]
. . . . . . .
HYMN
A. R. Ammons
I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth
and go on out
+++ over the sea marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
+++ +++ where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
+++ into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark
And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
+++ coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces
You are everywhere partial and entire
You are on the inside of everything and on the outside
I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
+++ far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves
…. .. .. . y y yee yeeesss …
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Thanks for sharing a great day at Weymouth!
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it was absolutely delightful… thanks to the entire board for a well organized and thoughtful event! ~i
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These are such exact and wonder-filled poems for Earthy Day—each line a keen reminder of the Earth which is after all our Home. Thank you, verse and Image, again and again for Being Here! And of course: Bill.
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Thanks, Katherine, and thanks again to Paul, Sandra, and Jenny who suggested poems. Watch for April 22 EARTH DAY and April 23 epilogue posts. —B
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