tricky

  

sea water

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When we first started looking through microscopes
a cold fear blew and it's still blowing.
Life hitherto had been frantic enough
in all its shapes and dimensions.
Which is why it created small-scale creatures,
assorted tiny worms and flies,
but at least the naked human eye
could see them. 

But then suddenly beneath the glass,
foreign to a fault
and so petite,
that what they occupy in space
can only charitably be called a spot.
The glass doesn't even touch them,
they double and triple unobstructed,
with room to spare, willy-nilly.

To say they're many isn't saying much.
The stronger the microscope
the more exactly, avidly they're multiplied.
They don't even have decent innards.
They don't know gender, childhood, age.
They may not even know they are - or aren't.
Still they decide our life and death.
Some freeze in momentary stasis,
although we don't know what their moment is.

Since they're so minuscule themselves,
their duration may be
pulverized accordingly.
A windborne speck of dust is a meteor
from deepest space,
a fingerprint is a farflung labyrinth
where they may gather
for their mute parades,
their blind iliads and upanishads.
I've wanted to write about them for a long while,
but it's a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.


—Wisława Szymborska
microcosmos 
Stanisław Barańczak, Clare Cavanagh version

 

 

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To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. 

These things were before ever man stood on the shore of the ocean and looked out upon it with wonder; they continue year in, year out, through the centuries and the ages, while man’s kingdoms rise and fall.

—Rachel Carson

Under the Sea Wind

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It’s nice
after dinner
to walk down
to the beach
and find
the biggest thing
on earth
relatively calm.

—A. R. Ammons

Reading

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everything is magnificent with existence

 

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I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there: each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is
magnificent with existence, is in 
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!


—A. R. Ammons
Still

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know it as it is known/by galaxy and cedar cone

 

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I don't know somehow it seems sufficient

to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine: 
for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it: 
the swamp's slow water comes
down Gravelly Run fanning the long
stone-held algal
hair and narrowing roils between
the shoulders of the highway bridge: 
holly grows on the banks in the woods there,
and the cedars' gothic-clustered
spires could make
green religion in winter bones: 
so I look and reflect, but the air's glass
jail seals each thing in its entity: 
no use to make any philosophies here:
I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never 
heard of trees: surrendered self among
unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road. 


—A. R. Ammons 

Gravelly Run

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