Ephemera

(Temporary Postings for "Chemistry by Candle Light")

Things don't stay here long... guess why.

•••

Identity 

A. R. Ammons
(corrected, according to A.R. Ammons, The Selected Poems, Expanded Edition, Norton, 1955)

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?

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 

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 (interesting 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.

•••

Telescope

by Louise Glück

There is a moment after you move your eye away

when you forget where you are

because you’ve been living, it seems,

somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.

You’re in a different place,

a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in a body.

You exist as the stars exist,

participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.

At night, on a cold hill,

taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward

not that the image is false

but the relation is false.

You see again how far away

each thing is from every other thing.

“Telescope” by Louise Glück from Averno. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Reprinted with permission in The Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keilor, August 17, 2015

•••

The Nature of Musical Form

William Bronk (1918-1999)

It is hard to believe of the world that there should be

music in it: these certainties against

the all-uncertain, this ordered fairness beneath

the tonelessness, the confusion of random noise.

It is tempting to say of the incomprehensible,

the formlessness, there is only order as we

so order and ordering, make it so: or this,

there is natural order which music apprehends

which apprehension justifies the world;

or even this, these forms are false, not true,

and music irrelevant at least, the world

is stated somewhere else, not there, But no.

How is it? There is a fairness of person too,

which is not a truth of persons or even, we learn,

a truth of that person, particularly.

It is only fairness stating only itself:

as though we could say of music only, it is.