Quotes from A.R. Ammons

You are everywhere partial and entire. You are on the inside of everything and on the outside.

Flux heightens is into knots of staid tension.

Where I am going, nothing of me will remain: yet, I'll drift through the voices of coyotes, drip into florets by a mountain rock.

I allow myself eddies of meaning: yield to a direction of significance running like a stream through the geography of my work: you can find in my sayings swerves of action like the inlet's cutting edge: there are dunes of motion, organizations of grass, white sandy paths or remembrance in the overall wandering of mirroring mind: but Overall is beyond me — A.R. Ammons, from "Corsons Inlet," Collected Poems: 1951-1971 (W. W. Norton & Co., 1972)

anybody doesn't believe in reality should try to start a dead car on a 10-degree morning:

Things go away to return, brightened for the passage

One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.

What destruction have I been blessed by?

The reeds give way to the wind and give the wind away

I've pressed so far away from my desire that if you asked me what I want I would, accepting the harmonious completion of the drift, say annihilation, probably.

To be saved is here, local and mortal

not so much looking for the shape as being available to any shape that may be summoning itself through me from the self not mine but ours.

You came one day and as usual in such matters significance filled everything- your eyes, the things you knew, the way you turned, leaned, stood, or sat, this way or that.

Plant the seed whose vine or tree may hang you.

Where but in the very asshole of comedown is redemption: as where but brought low, where but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we discern the savage afflictions that turn us around: where but in the arrangements love crawls us through

It was May before my attention came to spring and my word I said to the southern slopes I've missed it, it came and went before I got right to see: don't worry, said the mountain, try the later northern slopes or if you can climb, climb into spring: but said the mountain it's not that way with all things, some that go are gone

Reflective I found a weed that had a mirror in it and that mirror looked in at a mirror in me that had a weed in it

The oppressed grows weightless: doze/n th/rough c/and/or man/aged leg/ions stud/ents

Equilibrations If you walk back and forth through a puddle pretty soon you wet the whole driveway but of course dry the puddle up.

I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished: I hold it in me like a pregnancy or as on my lap a child not to grow or grow old but dwell on

Like the hills under dusk you fall away from the light: you deepen: the green light darkens and you are nearly lost: only so much light as stars keep manifests your face: I feel the total night in myself rave for the light along your lips.

Bees die with the burnt honey at their mouths, at least.

You came one day and as usual in such matters significance filled everything - your eyes, the things you knew, the way you turned, leaned, stood, or sat, this way or that: when you left, the area around here rose a tilted tide, and everything that offers desolation drained away.

in art, we do not run to keep up with random moments, we select & create the moment occurring forever: