I don't know somehow it seems sufficient <br />to see and hear whatever coming and going is, <br />losing the self to the victory <br /> of stones and trees, <br />of bending sandpit lakes, crescent <br />round groves of dwarf pine: <br /> <br />for it is not so much to know the self <br />as to know it as it is known <br /> by galaxy and cedar cone, <br />as if birth had never found it <br />and death could never end it: <br /> <br />the swamp's slow water comes <br />down Gravelly Run fanning the long <br /> stone-held algal <br />hair and narrowing roils between <br />the shoulders of the highway bridge: <br /> <br />holly grows on the banks in the woods there, <br />and the cedars' gothic-clustered <br /> spires could make <br />green religion in winter bones: <br /> <br />so I look and reflect, but the air's glass <br />jail seals each thing in its entity: <br /> <br />no use to make any philosophies here: <br /> I see no <br />god in the holly, hear no song from <br />the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter <br />yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never <br />heard of trees: surrendered self among <br /> unwelcoming forms: stranger, <br />hoist your burdens, get on down the road.<br /><br />Archie Randolph Ammons<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/gravelly-run/
