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

WIND IN THE REEDS IN THE VOICE OF A. R. AMMONS 299

tranquility: the birds are lively with

voice:

He ’s come from his home in Ithaca, New York, “back to my home country” and
the graveyard holding parents, teachers, “trinket aunts who always had a little /
something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark / or a penny or nickel.”

I stand on the stump

of a child, whether myself

or my little brother who died, and

yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for

for me it is the dearest and the worst,

it is life nearest to life which is

life lost:

Into this place of origin his lines move as far as they can, then withdraw, at least
holding onto a bleak childhood. Those last two lines have hope going for them.
Tranquil, Ammons sees “something I had never seen before”: two bald eagles
going north, “oaring the great wings steadily,” circling, coasting, resting. One
veers away and circles again, “looking perhaps for a draft,” then comes back,
and flying off together “they broke across the local bush and trees.” Seeing their
patterns of exploring and returning, he ends by calling this

a dance sacred as the sap in

the trees, permanent in its descriptions

as the ripples round the brook’s

ripplestone: fresh as this particular

flood of burn breaking across us now

from the sun.

The birds’ “descriptions”: punwise we say their flight “describes” a circle,
much as the poet describes it. And always particulars—ripplestone!—otherwise
what ’s the point? Permanent as ripples, fresh as sunburst. And why “us,” in this
solitary venture? The aunts and parents, maybe his little brother, himself with
that penny for Sunday school, the piping birds, the migrating eagles in their
(and his poem’s) sinuous movements?
“Sunday Morning,” by Wallace Stevens, ends as quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Ammons too finds sacredness on earth not in heaven, though his “Easter Morn-