POeT SHOTS is a monthly feature published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt

POeT SHOTS #1, Series C

PLUNDER by A.R. Ammons

I have appropriated the windy twittering of aspen leaves
into language, stealing something from reality like a
silverness: drop-scapes of ice from peak sheers:

much of the rise in brooks over slow-roiled glacial stones:
the loop of reeds over the shallow’s edge when birds
feed on the rafts of algae: I have taken right out of the

air the clear streaks of bird music and held them in my
head like shafts of sculptured glint: I have sent language
through the mud roils of a raccoon’s paws like a net,

netting the roils: made my own use of a downwind’s
urgency on a downward stream: held with a large scape
of numbness the black distance upstream to the mountains

flashing and bursting: meanwhile everything else, frog,
fish, bear, gnat has turned in its provinces and made off
with its uses: my mind’s indicted by all I’ve taken.

A poet’s poem—it sings symphonically! Fresh language: “drop-scapes of ice from peak sheers,” “shifts of sculptured glint,” “mud roils of a raccoon’s paws.” Just chew and slosh around those phrases in your mouth—best tasting dark chocolate! The many continual colons allow the poem to roll on like a mighty river. A sequence like ”frog, fish, bear, gnat” underscores the power of our English language to use its many monosyllabic words.

Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.