Mechanism

M

A. R. Ammons

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,

morality: any working order,

animate or inanimate: it

has managed directed balance,

the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,

some energy left to the mechanism,

some ash, enough energy held

to maintain the order in repair,

assure further consumption of entropy,

expending energy to strengthen order:

honor the persisting reactor,

the container of change, the moderator: the yellow

bird flashes black wing-bars

in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,

startles the hawk with beauty,

flitting to a branch where

flash vanishes into stillness,

hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:

honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,

the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies

of control,

the gastric transformations, seed

dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into

chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,

blood compulsion, instinct: honor the

unique genes,

molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into

sets, the nucleic grain transmitted

in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,

some cells set aside for the special work, mind

or perception rising into orders of courtship,

territorial rights, mind rising

from the physical chemistries

to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male

and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper

racial satisfaction:

heat kept by a feathered skin:

the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen

burner under the flask)

so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates

interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum

efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame

staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and

necessary worked out of random, reproducible,

the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the

goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations

that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a

great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.

Rating:

Comment form:

Similar Poems:

Rain by Francis Ponge

Francis Ponge

The rain, in the backyard where I watch it fall, comes down at different  rates. In the center a fine discontinuous curtain — or network — falls implacably and yet gently in drops that are probably quite light; a strengthless sempiternal precipitation, an intense fraction of the atmosphere at its purest. A little distance from the walls to the right and left plunk heavier drops, one by one. Here they seem about the size of grains of wheat, the size of a pea, while elsewhere they are big as marbles. Along gutters and window frames the rain runs horizontally, while depending from the same obstacles it hangs like individually wrapped candies. Along the entire surface of a little zinc roof under my eyes it trickles in a very thin sheet, a moiré pattern formed by the varying currents created by the imperceptible bumps and undulations of the surface. From the gutter it flows with the restraint of a shallow creek until it tumbles out into a perfectly vertical net, rather imperfectly braided, all the way to the ground where it breaks and sparkles into brilliant needles.

Each of its forms has its particular allure and corresponds to a particular patter. Together they share the intensity of a complex mechanism  as precise as it is dangerous, like a steam-powered clock whose spring is wound by the force of the precipitation.

The ringing on the ground of the vertical trickles, the glug-glug of the gutters, the miniscule strikes of the gong multiply and resonate all at once in a concert without monotony, and not without a certain delicacy.

Once the spring unwinds itself certain wheels go on turning for a while, more and more slowly, until the whole mechanism comes to a stop. It all vanishes with the sun: when it finally reappears, the brilliant apparatus evaporates. It has rained.
Translated from the French

135

Rating:

Beyond Hammonton by Stephen Dunn

Stephen Dunn

Night is longing, longing, longing,
beyond all endurance.
—Henry Miller The back roads I’ve traveled late

102

Rating:

In Time by Gerald Stern

Gerald Stern

As far as clocks—and it is time to think of them—
I have one on my kitchen shelf and it is
flat, with a machine-made flair, a perfect
machine from 1948, at the latest,
and made of shining plastic with the numbers
sharp and clear and slightly magnified in
that heartbreaking post-war style, the cord
too short, though what does it matter, since the mechanism

118

Rating: