I have returned to working through A.R. Ammons early collected. On every page, with pretty much every line, I can hear Walt Whitman. He has taken Ammons by the hand and walked him through the wild, wild world. Every dozen pages or so something jumps out at me, but otherwise the poetry feels slack and essayistic. Entire poems can go by without an image, or, mostly, one image tucked into the middle of hopeless craft. The words are all over the page, which, I think, is meant to add tension, but I'm not feeling it. I find myself sighing and trying to read faster; it's almost four hundred pages long. That'll suck the hope right out o' ya.
On the other hand, after reading Jack Gilbert, I sat down and scribbled this out. Real quick early draft, but it makes me feel all cozy.
The smell of the autumn’s apples on the ground
accompanied the albino deer Dominic saw
as it stepped further into the abandoned grove.
The rest of us gathered around the window
as quietly as we could, carrying the garlic, onions
and carrots we’d been chopping for the stew.
We had our university packed in books
in the smooth wooden rooms of the small cabin
we’d borrowed from Emily’s family friend.
The deer was moving down and away
from the mountain river white with recent rain.
Dana had only recently begun to touch me.
In two years, we’d move west and marry.
Dom and Luna would separate as soon as summer
sent him to law school in New England.
It’s hard to say if we’d agree that the deer
moved us more than the bat skeleton
in the spider web, or the twenty mile view
from the granite outcrop after the three mile hike.
We thought we were drawing our future
on our bodies with henna paste,
but it stepped away into the rising forest.
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