Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

WIND IN THE REEDS IN THE VOICE OF A. R. AMMONS 295

Enough

I thought the

woods afire

or some

house behind the

trees

but it was

the wind

sprung loose

by a random

thunderstorm

smoking pollen fog

from the

evergreens

Strike a branch in the right season and a puff of pollen bursts out. Ammons calls
it fog, coming as it does from acres of trees in slanting light. Looking for fire,
he finds a pun on “smoking”: to smoke out, force out of hiding, give away, plus
the smoke he thought he saw. One jolt of perception is event “enough” for a
poem—just to recognize the actual, the thing itself, gold-yellow pollen clouds,
without lifting off into conjecture.
Archie Randolph Ammons was born near the town of Whiteville, North
Carolina, in a farmhouse built by his grandfather on fifty acres, half woods,
half cleared for tobacco. During the Depression his family was dirt poor. He
never brought more than a penny to Sunday school, “And we were lucky if we
had a penny to bring.” In early spring the boy was excused from his one-room
schoolhouse to help with plowing and chores. The adult recalls he ’d hitch up
his mule Silver

and go out, wrench in my hip pocket for later adjustments,

down the ditch-path

by the white-bloomed briars, wet crabgrass, cattails,

and rusting ferns,

riding the plow handles down.

Riding the plow handles—a fine recollection, but going home again takes its toll.

The sap is gone out of the trees

in the land of my birth

and the branches droop

The rye is rusty in the fields

and the oatgrains are light in the wind...

The wind whipped at my carcase saying

How shall I

coming from these fields

water the fields of earth