by A. R. Ammons
recalcitrance, fluency: these:
75too far with one and the density
darkens, the mix slows, and bound
up with hindrance, unyielding, stops:
too far with the other and the bright
spiel of light spins substanceless
80descriptions of motion—
always to be held free this way,
staggering, jouncing, testing the
middle mix,
the rigid line of the free and easy
6
85there is no tedium, apparently,
to mere things in eternity: sunset,
now underway with rosy ruffles,
deep glows becoming space effects,
all that, so fresh and vanishing,
90so old, the sun itself simultaneously
setting and rising continuously
on this or that sea or mountain range,
gorilla troop or small nation: Lord
God, I cry out (hear me), hear us:
95but the Lord God changes before our minds
and becomes a listening device
four warps and a reach (woof) deep into
space: we cry out, bending an umbrella
of focus His way to penetrate
100nothingness, signals, arbitrary, noticeable, intelligible
7
some branches, the
birch’s, end bushy
but the squirrel,
no aerial rail to catch, will
105leap into the vague
net and, bounding, find
route to hard wood
8
we went for a raw walk in the
high middling of the afternoon, the
110wind getting into and up our coats
and even gently into our pants:
nevertheless, we would not be daunted,
the rain also, though sparsely and
smallishly, prickling us, it being
115forced forward stingingly by the gusts:
the evergreens and clouds rolled:
we heard the tough, rattling burr of
highwind in the hardwoods and the softer muffle
of cedar boughs: we noticed the
120forsythia standing half-out: we
noticed the honeysucklebushes filled
with tiny green lotus temples where last
week ice had hung cold-dry or rattled loose:
Bernie said he wasn’t much interested
125in nature but if we didn’t have it we’d have to
think of something to take its place
9
cauliflowers are either real or
illusory, ditchbanks shed inward into their
courses old cattail fuzz, fern
130fiddleheads, sporophyte flimsy either
appearance or verifiability:
gravy runs down the chin and forms
brothy drops that can’t or can favor stain:
why test mind on the reality stone:
135nothing will be determined but that
mind, too, terribly flows and stalls, holds
and gives way: if you don’t
eat the imaginary potato (grown in an
imaginary field, baked in an imaginary
140oven) your real capacity
to imagine illusion lessens:
hug thighs to thighs, sit broken with clarity
of delight at children
in the early afternoon sun, hold
145on to some specification of curvature
the “flavor” of a mind that once informed
a love face, let nothing vanish that has not
proved out a firm roundaway
miss the kingdom of feelings
150or find it too much and it is
indifferent who made the world or what
it was made of, stone or vision
10
the clumps and small reservoirs of
snow (as in forks of big trees where
155honeysucklebush sometimes starts or
moss or fern finds aerial pond)
are gone and no rain
worth troubling the soil has fallen
lately: the early morning brook is dark,
160its rock shale bottom showing through,
the water dawn-clear at last, filtered
black diamonds: the stump of a giant
dutch elm stands by: its bark warps
off in swales of curvature: splits
165enter radially closer
and closer to the heart: the meat
mush-sodden feeds mushrooms, big
whiteheaded, and brackets respond
vigorously to the softening:
170various mechanisms appropriate,
necessary, useful, even beautiful
will do away with it in time and then
the mechanisms will find other work,
earth’s supply of dutch elm stumps run out
11
175rather than the play of the mind as
wind on tidal or other creeks or
streams or even runlets developed in
gravel by macadamways, why not
dwell the mind on mushrooms till the several
180kinds define themselves, select their habitats,
go through a few life cycles, and reach their
roots into where they come from and
of what and how they go and get
back from there: attend to mushrooms and
185all other things will answer up:
while if you flick off (leaping like light)
all the scallops of a broad scape to keep it
noted and active, you may not in your own
summaries add much up
12
190how to exclude the central,
exclusive reductions, the narratives
that consume the environment
transparent into their symmetries:
how to get out into the looser
195peripheries where the roots of
specific trees hold them away from
the maelstrom and birds
have occasion to fly: but, of
course, not too far out, away, from
200the controlling knots
everything is established, even all
the motions: even the revolutions
turn with the gears of necessity
and even the little motion that
205gets away into some lost or possible
refiguring is figured on: there is
no cause for alarm: and no joy except
in buying everything
13
I like the ridge, its rolls my fixed ocean:
210not my, I don’t own an inch of it:
and not theirs, either, the ones who
do own it, for they don’t see it or
their part in it:
I’m part of the ridge they see in the
215east, their morning place: nearly in
the height of the summits around here
I see the sun come out of flat
land, nearly, lingeringly interfered
with by ordinary trees: for evening
220though the sun has gained space over
the lake, its setting among trees
no more than fuzz from here: it
encounters rockswales sharp on:
fire and stone flare together and the fluid
225yields and sinks past, burning, darkened, out:
but I like the ridge: it was a line
in the minds of hundreds of generations
of cold Indians: and it was there
approximately then what it is now
230five hundred years ago when the white
man was a whisper on the continent:
it is what I come up against:
it regularizes my mind though it has
nothing to do with me intentionally:
235the shows that arise in and afflict
&
nbsp; nature and man seem papery and
wrong when wind or time tears
through them, they seem not only
unrealistic but unreal: the ridge,
240showless, summary beyond the trappings
of coming and going, provides a
measure, almost too much measure,
that nearly blinds away the present’s
fragile joys from more durable woes
14
245I’ve had all the apples out of my
basket (or tossed them out, whole
or spotty-rotten) I couldn’t
wait to see the empty basket,
light, structurally transcendent:
250but some mornings I get up and can
make nothing of it: it is empty:
I fall into it and vanish: other
mornings it is the very starvation
I have longed for so long to chide
255and mock the world with:
but then it is a wastebasket and I
put it out to the use of the world:
it collects trash of the thoughty:
others (the litter litterers) give
260theirs to the wind, the chance and
random boys: but I don’t think
there’s much distinction between
saved and spent trash: trash is what
you make of it: if you throw it away
265you are rid of the problem—unless
a little bit is waiting to greet you
your next day round: and there is
no way, of course, finally to
throw anything away to
15
270considering mutability and muck,
transforming compositions and
decompositions, ups and downs, comings
and goings, you have, sir, passed
from a thousand orifices, some
275beneath you on the evolutionary
scale: visibly moved, the gentleman
got some roll-on ban deodorant
and tried to rub me off (or out):
shit sticks: its fragrance in the old
280days confirmed the caveman he was coming
home: a man’s shit (or tribe’s) reflects
(nasally) the physical makeup of the man
and the physiologies of those others
present, plus what they have gathered
285from the environment
to pass through themselves
the odor of shit is like language,
an unmistakable assimilation of a
use, tone, flavor, accent hard to
290fake: enemy shit smells like the enemy:
everything is more nearly incredible
than you thought at first
16
nature that roots under us
thrusting us up and out
295flows through assembling
us but eventually
the structures of the mouth
crack down to incontinent corners
moist, the eyes weeping
300air’s mere burn
(the waste in a woods gives
off the best heat and brightest
illumination: all growing is
gourd green: but the fallen
305lie about dry and light, lightwood,
ready at a click of fire to
rage response, its fast undoing its
best revelation)
_________
flows through
310taking us apart, returning fine knots
to recycling’s fuzzy frays
and chunks: can we not,
then, find in these majestic
necessities
315room for consideration,
notice of the sacred, an
overriding working steady
in care and keeping: look
elsewhere or go on paying close attention
320sap, brook, glacier, spirit
flowing, these are sacred but
in a more majestic aloofness
than we can know or reason with:
we can participate in it only
325imaginatively, even as we are
assembling to prevent the giving
way under us: a sacredness above
the sacredness we needed, which
would direct some arc, preferably
330a towering tower, some band or
quality of concern to
recognize us here in the
first case, being concerned,
different by that concern
335but we should not expect
easy sacredness that
turns aside to us when we wish
and leaves us alone to whole joys: we should
expect that the sacred, too, will
340try, elude, abandon us
so as to show something
high to realize, recalcitrant,
unyielding to makeshift in
its quality, something we could
345miss altogether even while it
sustained us throughout until the
carrying off or away
we assemble the variable materials until
balance begins
350defining out, then we explore the
validity of the balance, collecting and
testing in cooperation with it, then
its fullness approaching satisfactory
disposition, we test it down to see if
355it can give or crack: if it holds we
come into a high, intricate consideration
of the balance, the branches and
embranchments so fine, the recalcitrant
solidity of the mass or number and
360justice begins to appear, the distance
that lets the wolf run and kill and the
caribou mosey on: starved crows
showing up for hide shreds: the wolverine
cagey, careful, capable on the
365periphery of astonishing kills:
snow eaten for blood salt: so
many things to consider, undoing so
unlikely, assent follows, the wide band
of the mind shifting to acceptance,
370finding the staying place amid
horror, lust, need, necessity, that
which is, a small
place to walk in a system of others
17
we live again in the bellies
375of worms, fly again (?) with
winged worms: we come sponging
back to the tables of our children
to be swatted: since this
is one place,
380going is coming, ending beginning,
individual shape shed
like exoskeletons of spiritual flies
18
I go to nature not because
its flowers and sunsets speak
385to me (though they do) or
listen to me inquire but
because I have filled it with
unintentionality, so that I
can miss anything personal in
390the roar of sunset, so that
I can in beds of flowers hold
my head up, too: whereas,
the forms of intention, the
faces swept chill-firm with conviction
395can assemble and roll down
streets and declare divisions
that save or kill: I go to
nature because man is scary,
his mercilessness not like
400the jaguar’s which can be evaded
but like one’s own mercilessness,
inescapable as one’s own intellect
and devising, the mercilessness
from which there is no appeal
19
405I wouldn’t give up a hair of
the beautiful
high suasions of language,
celestial swales, hungering the
earth up into heaven, no,
410I would just implicate
the language with barklike beeps,
floppy turf
of songsound, I would lift up so much
of the whatnot
415it would pull the heavens down
commingling with things and us
I would give up nothing
if I had my way: I would just
idle a belt or two of trees over here
420a while and turn aside a river or
so there, and keep a few continents
waiting a second, and I would
go from one thing to another until
I had the impression I could tell what
425was going on and I would sing it all
up, like lassoing, and tie it down
20
when the hand falls apart it makes
a handful of bones, a
spill or smallest cairn: no matter
430how much the hand taught
of love or how many times it flew
upward to catch the raiments of heads
of hair or how busy it seemed in water
quick fish or how it was the strongest
435shoal many a death could reach or how
much it seemed to assume the forms of
its tasks
here it is now a fact, neutral,
plain, open for inspection, the cutest
440collection, a peak white as a
peak tip, take some into your hands,
take them with you, hold them up to the light
to see, roll them, throw them,
conjure up the wind’s chances with them
21
445heaven can be as purified as your
consciousness demands, I suppose, but
think of a heaven with people only in it,
gorillas missing, not worthy of soul,
but if all things are soulful and kept
450why then will we meet as well as our
old friends the chickens we’ve killed
and/or eaten, sows and piglets, shoats
and boars and other animals, quite
an extensive catalog in our freezers and
455refrigerators, will they be there grunting
at us or, indeed, rushing
us, gobbling our souls up
22
once you’ve caught the notion,