Identity poem – A. R. Ammons poems | Poetry Monster
1) An individual spider web identifies a species:
an order of instinct prevails through all accidents of circumstance, though possibility is high along the peripheries of spider webs: you can go all around the fringing attachments
and find disorder ripe, entropy rich, high levels of random, numerous occasions of accident:
2) the possible settings of a web are infinite:
how does the spider keep identity while creating the web in a particular place?
how and to what extent and by what modes of chemistry and control?
it is wonderful how things work: I will tell you about it because
it is interesting and because whatever is moves in weeds and stars and spider webs and known is loved: in that love, each of us knowing it, I love you,
for it moves within and beyond us, sizzles in to winter grasses, darts and hangs with bumblebees by summer windowsills:
I will show you the underlying that takes no image to itself, cannot be shown or said, but weaves in and out of moons and bladderweeds, is all and beyond destruction because created fully in no particular form:
if the web were perfectly pre-set, the spider could never find a perfect place to set it in: and
if the web were perfectly adaptable, if freedom and possibility were without limit, the web would lose its special identity:
the row-strung garden web keeps order at the center where space is freest (intersecting that the freest “medium” should accept the firmest order)
and that order diminishes toward the periphery allowing at the points of contact entropy equal to entropy.
Archie Randolph Ammons (1926-2001) was an important American poet, a modern classic, Ammons wrote about ourrelationship to nature in a way that is both comic and solemn. His poems often addressreligious and philosophical matters and scenes involving nature in a manner that is almost transcendental.
