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World Poetry Translation Project


Submit Human Translation | Discuss Poem | Post Poetry | Listen McGill Live

Identity

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.


American Review | www.PaperLyon.com | McGill Live Radio | Publish
 

  Translations for this Poem
 English  Spanish  French  German
 Italian  Portuguese  Korean  Russian
 Chinese  Japanese    
 

  Poems by A.R. Ammons
  1. An Improvisation For Angular Momentum
  2. Called Into Play
  3. Design
  4. Eyesight
  5. Gravelly Run
  6. Hymn
  7. Identity
  8. In Memoriam Mae Noblitt
  9. Poetics
  10. Rapids
  11. Rivulose
  12. Rogue Elephant
  13. Shit List Or Omnium-gatherum Of Diversit
  14. Small Song
  15. Still
  16. Their Sex Life
  17. The City Limits
 
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPRSTVWY[ALL] 
  A.E. Housman 
  A.R. Ammons 
  A.S.J. Tessimond 
  Abraham Cowley 
  Adam Zagajewski 
  Adrienne Rich 
  Ai 
  Alan Dugan 
  Alan Seeger 
  Alden Nowlan 
  Alexander Pope 
  Alfred Lord Tennyson 
  Alfred Noyes 
  Algernon Swinburne 
  Alice Duer Miller 
  Alice Walker 
  Allen Ginsberg 
  Amy Clampitt 
  Amy Lowell 
  Andrew Marvell 
  Andrew Paterson 
  Anna Akhmatova 
  Anne Bradstreet 
  Anne Carson 
  Anne Sexton 
  Annie Dillard 
  Anthony Hecht 
  Antonio Machado 
  Archibald MacLeish 
  Arthur Hugh Clough 
  Audre Lorde 
  Austin Clarke 
 

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