Thursday, February 18, 2016

Born Ninety Years Ago Today





MECHANISM

A.R. Ammons

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,
          morality: any working order,
       animate or inanimate: it
has managed directed balance,
          the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,
       some energy left to the mechanism,
some ash, enough energy held
          to maintain the order in repair,
       assure further consumption of entropy,
expending energy to strengthen order:
          honor the persisting reactor,
       the container of change, the moderator: the yellow
bird flashes black wing-bars
          in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,
       startles the hawk with beauty,
flitting to a branch where
          flash vanishes into stillness,
       hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:
honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
          the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
       of control,
the gastric transformations, seed
          dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
       chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,
blood compulsion, instinct: honor the
          unique genes,
       molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into
sets, the nucleic grain transmitted
          in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,
       some cells set aside for the special work, mind
or perception rising into orders of courtship,
          territorial rights, mind rising
       from the physical chemistries
to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male
          and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper
       racial satisfaction:
heat kept by a feathered skin:
          the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen
       burner under the flask)
so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates
          interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum
       efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame
staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and
          necessary worked out of random, reproducible,
       the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the
goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations
          that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a
       great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf. 


*

High Egoslavian Holy Day, this the standard Archie Ammons post: h/t self-portrait and interview with Ammons. Here's a profile of Ammons by David Lehman. His 1993 book length Garbage is quite possibly the single volume of poetry I've read most often: ask me and if I like you I will buy you a copy. Below, Garbage, part 3. If I played My Sillyass Des....












Click Ammons tag for more poems.

*


THE CITY LIMITS

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

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the 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 consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way 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, then the
heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

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



HYMN


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

1 comment:

  1. ammmons' stuff is great, innit?

    the poem 'hymn' reminds me that i still want to read what william james wrote about the panentheism of fechner

    'mechanism' goes into glorious detail - in a complementary way, may i recommend

    Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows

    the beginning of Meadows' book

    Early on in teaching about systems I often bring out a Slinky. In case you grew up without one, a Slinky is a toy — a long, loose, brightly colored spring that can be made to bounce up and down, or pour back and forth from hand to hand, or walk itself downstairs.

    I perch the Slinky on one upturned palm. With the fingers of the other hand I grasp it from the top, partway down its coils. Then I pull the bottom hand away. The lower end of the Slinky drops, bounces back up again, yo-yos up and down, suspended from my fingers above.

    "What made the Slinky bounce up and down like that?" I ask students. "Your hand. You took away your hand," they say. So I pick up the box the Slinky came in and hold it the same way, poised on a flattened palm, held from above by the fingers of the other hand. With as much dramatic flourish as I can muster, again I pull the lower hand away. Nothing happens. The box just hangs there.

    "Now once again. What made the Slinky bounce up and down?"

    The answer clearly lies within the Slinky itself. The hands that manipulate it suppress or release some behavior that is already latent within the structure of the spring. That is a central insight of systems theory. A system is a set of things, people, cells, molecules, or whatever, interconnected in such a way that they produce their own internal dynamics. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system's response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.

    ReplyDelete