An Improvisation for Angular Momentum by A.R. Ammons
If for no other reason, I’d post this poem because it uses the word curlicues. Aside from that, I really love the mother imagery in the second stanza.
An Improvisation for Angular Momentum
By A.R. Ammons
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
Gads, but you have got good taste in poetry!
I was searching for a copy of “Friendship” by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik and found your site. Recognized the photo of Millay, and started looking around and what else had caught your eye. Or should I say ear?
Found many of my favorite authors — Teasdale, Akhmatova, Szymborska — and a fair few I’d not hear but was happy to discover.
Always glad to find new authors… nicely done!
May I congradulate you on keeping the site going for what looks like close to five years. I’ve bookmarked your site, and have to say I’m glad and impressed.
Doug
Doug,
Thanks so much for the comment! Friendship is one of my favorite poems of all time, and I’m glad to hear from someone else who appreciates it. Edna St. Vincent Millay is my favorite poet. She led such an incredible life and her talent is amazing. I wish I would have had the chance to hear her read her poetry.
The PotD started on my livejournal, and I’ve had some hiatuses, but I’ve done my best to keep it going. I still haven’t transferred quite everything to this blog, but I’m working on it. I like the organization here better. I’m bowled over by how many people have registered on the site and how many great comments I’ve received. It makes it all worthwhile.
Rinabeana,
Another very compelling poem, thank you. I agree about the death mother imagery in the second stanza, questioned so sweetly by that introductory “perhaps” but ending so beautifully with this:
beyond the finework of frailty,
the mishmash house of the coming & going,
creation’s fringes,
the eddies and curlicues
This is like two poems for the price of one! Taken individually, I don’t know if anybody would think to unite the “two poems” in this poem under a single roof. I’m glad the author did, though, because it forces me to expand any thoughts that I would have with either stanza such that it can encompass the other. This poem really comes full circle. The second stanza, true to the ideas of angular momentum, it seems like the second stanza is the “force” that reigns in the first stanza and keeps it spinning around a central theme, but it’s the first stanza that provides much of the impetus of the poem, and is always looking to go beyond the restrictions imposed by the second stanza.
This poem is almost like you have somebody lazily wandering, enjoying the day until something happens and “reality snaps back in”.