A. R. AMMONS
Museums
The brook, running dry, will stop running when it's dry:
(it worms now like a lost line down the slate roughs
and drops) but it wrestles bank stones harshly after
downpours: slowed, it fills skinny dusk mirrors
with overhangs of branches that shade through
the stone bed into sky: the brook doesn't represent
beauty: it tears off a piece of shore moss, the soggy, threaded
bottom dangling in a strip: it sorts spill down ledges,
wears what it wears away, arcs in clear fangs or, skimming,
idles scum-floats: it doesn't fall apart representing
style: it means nothing but a sum of forces reacting
along a line to a sum of forces from whose sums the mind
makes up a day's subtractions, recollections: nothing
keeps it or wraps or hangs it up: but keep this
poem, a reminder not of keeping but of not keeping.
Time Being
Fate is a reading on what-is, merely,
a shadowy side of what-is, where
definition firms toward
an end that closes then gives up
the form that was its currency:
what-is does not assume
direction, respond to local
time, or take sharp shape: spirit-like,
it is neither young nor
old: it is come into and
