An Improvisation For Angular Momentum

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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 and going,

creation's fringes,

the eddies and curlicues.


–A. R. Ammons

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