Fasting

Not two months off till the shortest day, the
shadows near noon all flop over one way as if

it were soon to be dusk: that's winter coming
all right, slanted over, long-casting, &

pale: the trees are suddenly bristled
stripped: did the sun steam a frost up and melt

the leaves: probably not: squirrels shook
the leaves out of the lofts: some (people)

are strict, spare, and pure; some strew gems
in the mud: I perforce raise the level of the

mud till it endows shining, like lake
ice or sunny water or like a distant field of

pumpkins, leafless and unpicked, or even like
the first rye fields against gray woods, so

bright green: hark, the jewels are lost in
the general rising, and the rare and priceless

are cheapened by white towers in a still-blue
day: of course, you can't wear an image, a

windchurned figure from a volcano core, on
your finger, and some thoughts are too grand

to diadem a brain: (the tree by the road now
looks like a sketch for a tree): Halloween

needs what we have today — a stir: not a gale
so constant and high but gusts that show up

out of nowhere, presences that are not there,
little twirls of leaves that scoot across the

street and then just wilt out, forms,
air-whorls that are made out of nothing

but that touch your face or rustle into
the bushes, whispering and hissing: all kinds of

cases where motion charges the show
and where motion gives its form away by

picking up miscellany and throwing it off, motion
the closest cousin to spirit and spirit the

closest neighbor to the other world, haunted
with possibility, hope, anguish, and alarm.

A. R. Ammons
Epoch
Volume 52, Number 3
A Special Issue Dedicated to the Life and Work of A. R. Ammons

Copyright © 2004 by EPOCH
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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