Poems that you love

[rowens]

An Image for Longing; A. R. Ammons
I went to the summit and stood in the high nakedness:

the wind tore about this

way and that in confusion and its speech could not

get through to me nor could I address it:

still I said as if to the alien in myself


I do not speak to the wind now:

for having been brought this far by nature I have been

brought out of nature

and nothing here shows me the image of myself:

for the word tree I have been shown a tree

and for the word rock I have been shown a rock

for stream, for cloud, for star

this place has provided firm implication and answering


but where here is the image for longing:

so I touched the rocks, their interesting crusts:

I flaked the bark of stunt-fir:

I looked into space and into the sun

and nothing answered my word longing:


goodbye, I said, goodbye, nature so grand and

reticent, your tongues are healed up into their own element

and as you have shut up you have shut me out: I am

as foreign here as If I had landed, a visitor:

so I went back down and gathered mud

and with my hands made an image for longing:


I took the image to the summit: first

I set it here, on the top rock, but it completed

nothing; then I set it there among the tiny firs

but It would not fit:

so I returned to the city and built a house to set

the image in

and men came into my house and said


that is an image for longing

and nothing will ever be the same again

---

The Naked Land by K. Patchen


A beast stands at my eye.

I cook my senses in a dark fire.
The old wombs rot and the new mother
Approaches with the footsteps of a world.

Who are the people of this unscaled heaven?
What beckons?
Whose blood hallows this grim land?
What slithers along the watershed of my human sleep?

The other side of knowing ...
Caress of unwaking delight ... O start
A sufficient love! O gently silent forms
Of the last spaces.







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What heaven under regions
elbows to the top
another syncopated
legion of lisping-
clear voiced
orchestras of sound?
What?

What did you expect
beyond sound?

I can't say and still be talking:
though others can and will.

The hills there behind  /  the trees you can't see them;
their swoops and blue mysterious dales
and roots, vibrant lightless, cavities;
what words and natural things would be there.

I'm going this afternoon,
not even waiting till night.