Written by
A R Ammons |
1) An individual spider web
identifies a species:
an order of instinct prevails
through all accidents of circumstance,
though possibility is
high along the peripheries of
spider
webs:
you can go all
around the fringing attachments
and find
disorder ripe,
entropy rich, high levels of random,
numerous occasions of accident:
2) the possible settings
of a web are infinite:
how does
the spider keep
identity
while creating the web
in a particular place?
how and to what extent
and by what modes of chemistry
and control?
it is
wonderful
how things work: I will tell you
about it
because
it is interesting
and because whatever is
moves in weeds
and stars and spider webs
and known
is loved:
in that love,
each of us knowing it,
I love you,
for it moves within and beyond us,
sizzles in
to winter grasses, darts and hangs with bumblebees
by summer windowsills:
I will show you
the underlying that takes no image to itself,
cannot be shown or said,
but weaves in and out of moons and bladderweeds,
is all and
beyond destruction
because created fully in no
particular form:
if the web were perfectly pre-set,
the spider could
never find
a perfect place to set it in: and
if the web were
perfectly adaptable,
if freedom and possibility were without limit,
the web would
lose its special identity:
the row-strung garden web
keeps order at the center
where space is freest (intersecting that the freest
"medium" should
accept the firmest order)
and that
order
diminishes toward the
periphery
allowing at the points of contact
entropy equal to entropy.
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Written by
Les Murray |
In my aunt's house, the milk jug's beaded crochet cover
tickles the ear.
We've eaten boiled things with butter.
Pie spiced like islands, dissolving in cream, is now
dissolving in us.
We've reached the teapot of calm.
The table we sit at is fashioned of three immense
beech boards out of England.
The minute widths of the year
have been refined in the wood by daughters' daughters.
In the year of Nelson, I notice, the winter was mild.
But our talk is cattle and cricket.
My quiet uncle
has spent the whole forenoon sailing a stump-ridden field
of blady-grass and Pleistocene clay never ploughed
since the world's beginning.
The Georgic furrow lengthens
in ever more intimate country.
But we're talking bails,
stray cattle, brands.
In the village of Merchandise Creek
there's a post in a ruined blacksmith shop that bears
a charred-in black-letter script of iron characters,
hooks, bars, conjoined letters, a weird bush syllabary.
It is the language of property seared into skin
but descends beyond speech into the muscles of cattle,
the world of feed as it shimmers in cattle minds.
My uncle, nodding, identifies the owners
(I gather M-bar was mourned by thousands of head).
It has its roots in meadows deeper than Gaelic,
my uncle's knowledge.
Farmers longest in heaven
share slyly with him in my aunt's grave mischievous smile
that shines out of every object in my sight
in these loved timber rooms at the threshold of grass.
The depth in this marriage will heal the twentieth century.
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