An Improvisation For Angular Momentum

Portrait of A.R. Ammons
A.R. Ammons 1926–2001

Walking is like imagination, a single step dissolves the circle into motion; the eye here and there rests on a leaf, gap, or ledge, everything flowing except where sight touches seen: stop, though, and reality snaps back in, locked hard, forms sharply themselves, bushbank, dentree, phoneline, definite, fixed, the self, too, then caught real, clouds and wind melting into their directions, breaking around and over, down and out, motions profound, alive, musical!

Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother does not desert us but comes to tend and produce us, to make room for us and bear us tenderly, considerately, through the gates, to see us through, to ease our pains, quell our cries, to hover over and nestle us, to deliver us into the greatest, most enduring peace, all the way past the bother of recollection, beyond the finework of frailty, the mishmash house of the coming & going, creation's fringes, the eddies and curlicues

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