by A. R. Ammons
could be a momentary
memorial, an instant signifying its interval,
that what is gone is
going on with other
65going things,
a stability of motion
in time
accompanying its own time:
instead, a stone’s
70block
halts ongoing,
a blockage that says,
timelessness hereby measures
time going on as usual
9
75the stone-name signifies
what it can find to mean
in some living head:
when the heads
are empty,
80the stone’s name names emptiness,
not the one
now neither a thing that is nor was
10
as if the name were not
already nothing,
85stone, chipped away,
leaves the name nothingly
present,
grooves of absence
a further sign of a sign
90that lightens
the anchorage of its carriage
11
the grooves fill with moss,
though, that spring
speaks green
95and fall burns out with cold
into winter’s black writing
12
a mockingbird sings to a whole
graveyard: the turbulence,
polishing the gravestones,
100melts the names
13
the wind roars, sweeps, whirls,
nearly free even in its calms,
and the wind carries leaves, sand,
seed, whatever: rain pours,
105puddles, flows: the ground
yields to this or that pull, break,
flush: among the swirling
motions, the stone’s slow swirl
keeps the name
14
110a stone sinks in soil like
a pearl in oil
or gathers sand and leaves
from the wind
to heap itself away:
115or rain undermines a corner
and the name face
pitches to the ground
as if to call on
the deep for whatever rising
120might raise it up again
15
when gliding perhaps under a glacier
or dissolving to bacteria and roots
the stone wears smooth
and can no longer keep the name,
125will a clinging existence
give way, will an edge-fine
existence no longer exist
16
stones, names in them, are
just stones: when the stone
130brushes mind, memory
changes the stone clear through
17
what does it matter if
a stone falls or slides and
misidentifies a mound:
135the stone’s outward
reference given up it
calls to itself
18
stones, as if forms of intelligence,
stir: concentrate light
140still and you have them:
still, other durances exceed stones’—
a pulse in one of earth’s orbits
beats once in four hundred thousand years:
in certain orders of time
145stones blow by like the wind:
starlight pricks them like bubbles
19
the things of earth are not objects,
there is no nature,
no nature of stones and brooks, stumps, and ditches,
150for these are pools of energy cooled into place,
or they are starlight pressed
to store,
or they are speeding light held still:
the woods are a fire green-slow
155and the pathway of solid earthwork
is just light concentrated blind
20
the stone makes
its longest, hardest
“effort”
160to hold on to, memorialize
the glint
or glow
once
in someone’s eye
21
165not coarse, hard
things last
longest, perhaps,
but fine, the very fine:
if only the wind
170could take letters:
if only light
spelled names:
when love brushes
through our nerves
175and sends
a summary to our brains,
perhaps the summary
is sent by
vibrations
180really the universe’s—
the universe, something as old as that
and with as much future
22
if love is fine
and stones are harsh evanescences,
185how we may dishonor
love to letter down its name,
wasting the love
on the hard waters of inscription
23
the light in an eye
190transfigured in
frames of feeling—
how is this small well,
so shallow and
deep, so magical
195and plain able to
center all
the circumferences—
the eye itself
vision’s vision
200and visionary sway
24
the universe is itself
love’s memorial,
every cliff-face,
rocky loft having
205spent
itself through love’s light,
here held
till love again burn it free:
ninety percent
210of the universe is dead stars,
but look how the light still
plays flumes down
millennial ranges
25
nothing, though, not stone
215nor light lasts
like the place I keep
the love of you in and this
though nothing can write it down
and nothing keep it:
220nothingness
lasts long enough to keep it
26
if the tombstones were
thrown together in one pile,
that would be some gathering,
225a record higher than
Everest:
but if time crumbled the stones,
washed out the grit,
melted down the shapes,
230all the names distilled would
spell nothing
27
a flock of
gulls flew
by I thought but
235it was a
hillside of stones
28
this boundary stone plunked down
with no answering
cornerstone, no three-stone
240description of area, no field-square,
a point, dot
evaporated out of dimension,
but still a deep bound,
a boundary whorling deep
29
245the letters,
holding what they can, hold
in the stone
but holding flakes or
mists away—a
250grainweight of memory
or a rememberer goes:
in so many hundred years,
the names
will be light enough
255and as if balloons
will rise out of stone
3: Motions’ Holdings
Questionable Procedures
A bit of the universe’s
business slopped
over and, strung
out
of the way,
5cooled and lode-slow
gave rise
here and there to
a quickness like
shade, protoplasm,
10a see-through
coming and going of
dots and pulsing veils
that soon enough filled
the bit seas:
15the veils and cauls
toughened, curled
into rolls, centralized
backbone: taking to
the land and coming up
20into us, our agency,
they milled the
green continents white.
1979
Frost’s Foretellings
After fall, winds
rousing Halloween rains will
sometimes persist into
November
_________
5and on a halfmoon-bright night
dry the leaves and spool them
around, whirls
and spouts lifting them as if
to pencil the air the way
10typhoons inscribe seas or
the ground, the leaves
skimming
rises clean and letting
go to slack fall
15in hollows
or packing in along the roots
of catchment hedges:
the day drains down;
wind, time lean away
20and
the leaves stiffen still,
all night taking on
the cold strick fur
snow can deepen and fill out.
20 January
Another day promised for forty
come and gone, and we’re
still below freezing: but, at least,
the trees heavy with ice, it’s
5been calm: now, the gray deep
afternoon is turning windy, and
the thicket snaps like a fire,
ice creaking and jamming but
holding, an occasional splinter
10at a crack flicking free:
another night enameled ghostly!
yesterday afternoon the sun broke
out late and the trees, perpendicular
to the light, lit up strict white
15ice-lights at the fractures: tiny
stirs winked some: others held red, blue
glows, water-clear: tonight, we
have nothing to go on but continuance.
(1976)
Early Indications
Are the warblers drifting
through, now, so many
plinks and squeaks, muttering
squishes and near
5whistles in the bushes—
a wave bulging northward?
(my father called them
bloombirds—they came
treebloom-soon)
10individual leaves flicker
even on the stillest days, the hedges
jumpy with a vision not quite
put together: some hours the
birds drift mute, fog-fine
15driplets in a front:
their own score, they’re the notes,
too, of a broader swell
the sun’s all set to open with.
Loft
A sheet of shale chips
loose on my porch stoop
and its three hundred
million years, disrupted,
5rise like plain ice-air
around me, thinning
the present time:
I spin the sheet
sheer in a long arc
10to the yard’s shrub bank:
the grain splinters and,
reentering,
sinks toward the foundation
of its next three
15hundred million years.
1984 (1985)
Chiseled Clouds
A single
cemetery
wipes out
most
5of my
people,
skinny old
slabs
leaning this
10way
and that
as
in stray
winds,
15holding names:
still, enough
silver
cathedrals fill
this
20afternoon sky
to
house everyone
ever
lost from
25the
light’s returning.
1983 (1985)
Scaling Desire
A small boulder washed or
rolled down or out
of circumstance lay mid-desert,
a saltweed brittle in
5rockshade
sleep beside it, roots
angled under for the deep cool:
the wind, rising to heat,
said
10sit down by this big rock
and if in a year you’re
still not bored, I’ll show you
something really interesting:
but which way, I said, will
15interest go, to rock only
_________
or to showers
for the leafing saltbush:
or will you find me pavilions’ banners,
silks, cushions, sweets—
20the dew-soaked
roses of all longing.
1978
Tertiaries
A starving man dreams of more than enough
and the thirsty man does not conceive
a drop: in a roomy, almost flawless nothingness,
I’ve made my abundance and, look, I still have
5next to nothing, heaps of verbal glitterment,
rushes of feeling overrushing feeling:
you, well-founded in yourselves, have no
need of my show: keep away from it, it folds:
but how almost a true shower
10illusion is for me and others of us,
the perishing: we enter into word-rain and
so closely think we live, we nearly live.
1974 (1987)
Upper Limits
As the snow
that had
the tan-spent
hydrangea
_________
5heads down upsidedown
melted,
the ground-bow
stems
ticked their
10arcs away
as far as
they would
go up and straight,
and the wind’s
15gnarlings
pounced
on them
buffeting them
(though they
20wouldn’t stay)
higher than
they were
meant
to go again.
1984
Laboratory Materials
Drag in the diseased and afflicted
to the meticulous observers
and they are fields of glory to be reaped
into knowledge heightened severe and memorable,
5the clarity and reasonableness of
things gone wrong
but what is to be learned of the healthy person
he saunters in buoyant on a stack of splendor
to ask where to cart the next bad body off to:
10meanwhile the diseased look up to receive
instruction in wall-eyed
astonishment bordering on bliss.
1978
A Tendency to Ascendancy
Every day, I’m a foolish
man, misled: I have not only
my shambles but a shambles
of not knowing my shambles right,
5but when the winds get too
high (like the high side
of a schizophrenia)
gulls
take to the air: beach worms move
10at low tide to the deep bend
&nb
sp; of their U-tubes
and other things make arrangements
if not to cure, to endure the siege:
I go over:
15I assail the heights
and dwell in the continuous
sway of the mournful singing:
when matters lighten,
I fall & touch the ground,
20re-recognize & lightly assume the ground.
1974
Information Density
for Kenneth Burke
Generalization scans the contours of terrain
for the spot to take on concretion in,
the way a squirrel, having floated through
arches, zigzagged, digs for a nut, pear core,
5or pats one in: generalization acquaints us
with the wider forms of disposition, airily
leaves out a lot in order to be cursory and
carries little substance so as to move big:
the squirrel pops erect, checks out the boughs
10for dozing leapers, the bushes for stingers
snapping approaches, and waits to see if in the
chinks between branches a hawk’s
roving connects dots into nearing curvatures,