Ammons - Sphere: the Form of Motion

Copyright 1974 by A. R. Ammons Reissued as a Norton paperback 1995 All rights reserved The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Ammons, A R 1926
Sphere: the form of a motion.
Poem.
I. Title.
PS3501.M6S6 811 .54 74-8124 ISBN 978-0-393-31310-9 ISBN 978-0-393-35717-2 (ebk.) W. W. 10110
W. W. W.

Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU For Harold Bloom I went to the summit and stood in the high nakedness: the wind tore about this way and that in confusion and its speech could not get through to me nor could I address it: still I said as if to the alien in myself I do not speak to the wind now: for having been brought this far by nature I have been brought out of nature and nothing here shows me the image of myself: for the word tree I have been shown a tree and for the word rock I have been shown a rock, for stream, for cloud, for star this place has provided firm implication and answering but where here is the image for longing: so I touched the rocks, their interesting crusts: I flaked the bark of stunt-fir: I looked into space and into the sun and nothing answered my word longing: goodbye, I said, goodbye, nature so grand and reticent, your tongues are healed up into their own element and as you have shut up you have shut me out: I am as foreign here as if I had landed, a visitor: so I went back down and gathered mud and with my hands made an image for longing: I took the image to the summit: first I set it here, on the top rock, but it completed nothing: then I set it there among the tiny firs but it would not fit: so I returned to the city and built a house to set the image in and men came into my house and said that is an image for longing and nothing will ever be the same again Acknowledgments Sections 1 through 10 of this poem first appeared in Diacritics, Winter 1973, Vol. III, No. 4. My thanks for permission to reprint to the editor, David Grossvogel. Sections 71 and 72 appeared under the title Providences in Granite, Spring 1974. My thanks for permission to reprint to the editor, Anselm Parlatore.

I acknowledge with special pleasure and gratitude a faculty fellowship provided by the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University which enabled me to work for a year in the old Andrew D. White house and to finish this poem. Sphere The Form of a Motion