Bear Us Tenderly

An Improvisation for Angular Momentum

Walking is like

imagination, a


single step


dissolves the circle


into motion; the eye here


and there rests


on a leaf,


gap, or ledge,


everything flowing


except where


sight touches seen:


stop, though, and


reality snaps back


in, locked hard,


forms sharply


themselves, bushbank,


dentree, phoneline,


definite, fixed,


the self, too, then


caught real, clouds


and wind melting


into their directions,


breaking around and


over, down and out,


motions profound,


alive, musical!

Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother


does not desert us but comes to tend


and produce us, to make room for us


and bear us tenderly, considerately,


through the gates, to see us through,


to ease our pains, quell our cries,


to hover over and nestle us, to deliver


us into the greatest, most enduring


peace, all the way past the bother of


recollection,


beyond the finework of frailty,


the mishmash house of the coming & going,


creation’s fringes,


the eddies and curlicues.

~ A.R. Ammons