by A. R. Ammons
then lets fall light forefeet and
15nuzzles into the ground again: the world,
not everything, need not be less than
it is—animals thrive and fail in similar
problems of motion and risk, pull and haul:
the jay lights squalling right into what he wants:
20the eagle wheels up in rigorous quiet, higher
and higher to find the right piece of ground.
1979
Stone Keep
He sat down and
wept
because there is neither saying
nor unsaying,
5wept the sunlight
free of leaves,
stitched up dandelions,
unsprinkled bluets,
broke birds’
10songs down:
everything going on
went on
over, though, on over
his cold keep:
15he hugged the heaving stone
tight.
1965
Autonomy
I am living without you because
of a terror, a farfetched
notion that I
can’t live without you
5which I must narrow down & quell,
for how can I live
worthy of you, in the
freedom of your limber engagements,
in the casual uptakes of your
10sweetest compliances
if stricken in your presence
by what your absence stills:
_________
to have you, I school myself
to let you go; how terrible
15to buy that absence
before the fragrance of any presence comes:
but though I am living without
you, surely
I can’t live
20without you: the thought of
you hauls my heavy
body up,
floats me around,
gives my motions point, just the thought.
1981 (1986)
Backcasting
I can tell by
the way
gravel will spill
through me some
5day it’s
all right to
mess around: I can
tell by the way
light will
10find me transparent I
can’t be gross:
I drift,
slouch about, spoof:
I true the
15coming-before
to the consequence.
1974 (1986)
Checking out the Resources
Ice nearly meeting in the middle
has
drawn the brook out of sight
except for a central
5ruffle that doesn’t give
black glitter-winding up—imagine
a cold night’s shelves of ice
knitted from the bank’s
rubble and
10held, pavilions, solid out over
the various disturbances
coming undone
to a few degrees of morning heat—
such waywardness, loss!
15a dip rebuilds it overnight.
Dominion
Glittery river, I said,
rise, but
it didn’t:
stop, then, damn
5it, but it
didn’t:
O river, I said,
ruffle
blurring
_________
10windknots up
(and
that was nice
like perch striking roils
at surface
15flies):
river, I said, don’t
turn back,
and it eased on
by,
20majestic in the sweetest
command.
1979
Hairy Belly
I don’t take brooks seriously
but you could say if a brook’s dry
it’s stopped running or
gravity’s off—I don’t
5take verse seriously but
if it moves inaccurately
potholes appear in the street:
they say: I may take verse
less seriously than that:
10gravity, though, isn’t that
a weak-field force: verse is:
but prevalent: it dwells along
the shale edges in brook-ripples’ shadows:
the shadow of vine-threads is a
15good place: also, though, it
_________
dwells in the special activity
of chloroplasts’ vine-skin
cells along the sunny
line: but I don’t take
20vines over brooks or defining
shale ledges too seriously: still,
if chloroplasts didn’t jiggle-knit
spinning in sunny cells, your
lips’ scarlet would not be scarlet long.
1981 (1986)
Entranceways
If not ready to
go, to be gone
I looked about
at the heightenings leavetaking
5confers, things
abstracted
useless stricken
new:
perhaps, I thought,
10I will finally
be here
in going’s final syllable,
compensations idealizing,
departure entry:
_________
15but then the hunger,
say, for trees,
pear trees, the old
mellow wood,
the snow, sprouts,
20a tree,
to turn around
and see,
to feel, just as
the fingertip
25vanishes, to whirl
back, having learned how to
stay just as one is
swept away.
1983 (1986)
Dominant Margins
If the universe is spilling one
way (favoring this or that) it is
local abberation a brief time
formation controls
5for in the high places where the
middling finest balances work
equilibrium shimmers like any
lack of trouble in a still of mirrors:
oh, if one is skeptical and smart
10and sees through the boxes of
_________
practice the blank beyond of disbelief,
he needs mercy’s help for the knowing:
but, on the other hand, to waken
in an ultimate extremity, death or love,
15to a reveille bleaching out the colorful
pennants of belief!—a predicament
underpinning will have few resources
to rescue one from: but if you
sit still (there’s a name for that)
20balancing and unbalancing move
aside: among the leanest
gaps of value, a tiny motion,
narrow and fast, so fine it scorches
your hands with having it or not
25having it, a catchball of gusts
too indeterminate to name, invisible
and practically imperceptible anyhow,
there’s a difference (where there
is hardly any) there’s a difference
30going one way or the other.
1985
Power Plays
I know that splendor’s your
arms, your hands,
not spools and drifts of stars:
_________
your hair, falling, gives in
5the way desire builds defenseless:
you soothe my twists; unwinding,
they wind into your calm:
don’t be afraid: deference
controls me: I can
10win or lose you and find
the bone in your arm
still too fine to bear.
1969
Target
In spring the high twig tip
puts out a blur that,
if not undershadowed, represents
itself below with a
5correspondent invention on the ground:
the sun lengthens
drawing longer and longer northerly
arcs
until the leaf, if not undershadowed,
10declares its full singular shape:
the sun eases back wintering
south
and the high
leaf, acorns cracking,
15dives into its shadow running on the ground.
1974
Postulation
I place my be down,
but it
buzzes as on a
hotplate: I lift it,
5a clear
drop, and
place it shining down
again, but
it steams and stews:
10be, I say: it runs:
be, I say: it
hisses dry.
1979
Subsidiary Roles
I said to the brook stones
(rock brightest and most
available) you aren’t,
mute and drowned shallow,
5showing us what saying
comes to, a rush
in the underrush of silence:
I said, don’t take
away illusion, the aspiration
10that saying chips
room out of necessity’s
lidded hard lot:
and don’t, I said, going
right on, don’t
15come out dry, turtle-dull
in a dry spell, and
surface-babbling as
if for rain, show
us still
20more convincingly what saying changes.
1978
Working Out
It boom-a-loomed
& bam-a-lammed
last night in
the high-towered
5flash-lit hours
after midnight
turning by daybreak
into
meditation-like rain:
10celestial tensions
grounding,
electron clouds
swarmed up hills,
funneling up trees,
15to arc with heaven:
I grumbled to
sleep and the Japanese
beetles
newly arrived
20on the blanched
green Siberian
_________
elm leaves
that came out
where the doe
25fed in the yard last
month must have
shined
bronze-green through
the blue-bronze
30highlightings.
1982 (1986)
Remembering Old Caves
I think I’d like to die in the woods,
not wode, I mean, but wandered,
lost from the table drains,
embalmed arteries, away
5from musty music, plastic carpets,
and the softness
of the spoken word: imagine
being walked off halfdead by kinsmen
and left slumped by
10a log or rock, the screams already
on you or certain to come on
with night, friends turned back
caveward and all the wailing probably
attracting a big one that might not
15kill you before lugging you off, though.
1979 (1987)
Becoming Become Of
It’s a clear case with rivers—
they’re going to go on with the ongoing;
otherwise, darters headed upstream
would have no currency to keep true-still in:
5parasites and speckled snails that ride on
struck fronds or unshucked coconuts
wouldn’t float free to colonizations elsewhere:
riverweeds on wharf legs would flop sail-dull,
not dancing and pointing downstream where the action went.
Holding Sway
I waited for the robin, fluffing
and preening on a long branch
of honeysuckle, to fly off
so I could see by the lift how
5much his sway was, when a catbird
landed on the branch, farther out,
and that was a deep sway! then
the robin flew, lifting the catbird
a little, and then the catbird
10flew away, the branch springing up
pretty nicely: by subtracting the
catbird low from the two lifts
and guessing (by how much the catbird
had risen to the robin’s flight)
_________
15where the branch must have been
before the robin first came, I got
a good notion how close it came to
where it, then, was and how
much the robin had
20first brought down the branch.
The Dwelling
I would as soon believe
in paradise as in
nothing: it is no great
wonder that our spiritual
5energy, purified, returns
to, is, the eternal
residence: no greater
wonder than that earth is
here at all: imagine
10arriving on this green
curvature and being spent!
and no great wonder that
the eternal residence is
a place nothing wants to
15stay in, but only, from
the terrifying, exciting
confusions working energy
sharp, to return to:
belief’s a fine cloth:
20a sheen before the eyes,
it induces fabrications
ash can’t get to and just
residual energy composes:
let belief down somewhere,
25I say, the heart’s cravings
flaring bright into near
exemplifications: this
jewelry of brick and loft,
at least!—until ready for
30the greater knowledge, the
greatest, perhaps, we accede
to reason that here the plainnest
majesty gave us what it could.
1979 (1986)
The Hubbub
Just as the lesser gods, local,
imbalanced into activity,
loosened from wholeness into the efficacy
of partiality and preferment,
5just as the lesser gods, deriving
their powers from a stiller, higher
source, may suggest clearer
networks we can
appeal our wishes to, so we ourselves
10find helpful confinement in
smallish dispositions, pushing
severe thought aside at times to
fix dinner or giving up the sweets
of trance a minute
15to help guests shuffle off big
coats and snow boots:
_________
divinity’s loftier stations can worsen
one,
apprehensions that take hold so,
20shuddering and shivering
at being stilled, break out
in their midsts: sitting still in
contact with the central formless
seems worthiest as some, perhaps
25imagined, alternative to the roil
of time, frittering and fracturing
us sharp across surf-surfaces:
whereas being still inside,
having found a token or tidbit of safety
30(where, though, and how are suc
h
trifles when they are needed found—
in forced alternatives?)
enables us to grab the sailmast
and skim storm waves nearly at the wind’s force,
35supreme pleasure in the
speediest plunge and flare:
lessened down far to the trivial,
energyless, casual;—empty stances,
paradisal with indolence, sweeten
40to a sweetness savorless on high.
1983 (1986)
Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder
Midnight moonlight chisels the eaves’ icicles blue
but it’s so parched cold and
late, the moon
_________
shriveled sharp, the light splits
5into a dozen
dazzles per eaves-tooth—
the raccoon waggles through the
hedge tunnel and on off gritty over the glittery