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

WIND IN THE REEDS IN THE VOICE OF A. R. AMMONS 297

ing and dissolving, “the yielding resistances / of wind and water.” That reedlike
paradox, “yielding resistances,” happens again in “Expressions of Sea Level.”

Peripherally the ocean

marks itself

against the gauging land

it erodes and

builds.

Erodes andbuilds? Ammons was spared the spectacle of Nantucketers dredging
the sea bottom (and fish habitat) to replenish beaches below their bluff-top homes.
Erodes and builds. The dunes themselves do as much, while the poet gauges
what changes changelessly, the “tide-held slant of grasses / bent into the wind.”
He ’s riveted to “yielding resistance,” the converse between seashore grasses
and the elements.
If for an instant we could spot “a point of rest where / the tide turns,” then
we ’d have something, be somewhere. Ammons merges nature ’s loss and gain
with poetry’s:

is there an instant when fullness is,

without loss, complete: is there a

statement perfect in its speech.

This question might even touch on puns, that instant union of contraries—
loss and gain, reality and speech. “Expressions of Sea Level,” Ammons calls
his poem. Only a level conversation, words tied to things, mind to matter, will
find out fullness—fullness suspending loss for a moment, a dynamic fullness
embodying loss, change, motion.
Motion! It holds his attention, when the “motion of mind and thought cor-
respond to natural motions,” meandering like “winds or streams.” “A poem
is a walk,” taking us through turns and returns. Poems are like ice-skating
too, “inexhaustibly fresh and surprising,” always “an action.” And like surf-
ing, “shooting the curl,” when “one ‘dwells’ in an ongoing, onbreaking wave,”
finding “immobility in motion.”
“Motion,” a poem of his, admits that “The word is / not the thing,” but “the
music / in poems” can make it so. Decades later, in “Motion’s Holdings,” Am-
mons grasps a visual marvel with the zest of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

boulders, their green and white

moss-molds, high-held in moist

hill woods, stir hum with

stall and spill.

Their music, moss-molded, at once stalls and spills moisture, like a scooped rock