by A. R. Ammons
snow crust
10checking out the garbage routes,
his head down in a trance of cold,
lacking scent:
it’s time to give the spectral magic up, let
the eaves’ jewel-work go to waste:
15it’s into Sunday morning and not a can is out.
Red Shift
My begonia blossoms are
pale as a speleologist’s
windpipe, this winter
a cave’s clouds we’ve been
5traveling in: but, now,
the end of January is
breaking the sky into shale
the sunlight cracks through:
I’m moving the begonia
10closer up to the window:
when the freeze-foliage
on the panes burns off, the sun
will draw bright blood back into blossom.
1985
Saving Spending
My little way
though the
least way is
of the same way
5(assimilation and surprise)
as any
though it can
go
on, I suppose,
10branching, only
a little way:
but out to
its twiggiest
end, perhaps, curlicues
15of its directions
survive &
loosening waywardly
find their
way back to
20a
new way that
radiantly
roves or slightly
abandons the universe.
1982
Long Sorrowing
My path’s so
frail it’s
hardly discernible
from
5wilderness: no
gravelway
laid and no
signs up:
brookbanks are
10unmodified for crossings,
the flies ghastly:
but when I
tire I take up
backing with
15a boulder too old for any event
and doze and
listen for
existence
in its
20water-like
deep,
the voices of
ciliates & crustaceans
among
25tracings and fernprints
held in a dark unanswerableness
to so much loss.
1982 (1986)
Eidos
On those late March afternoons
when a flurry nearly rain
eases over and the few big
flakes, old flies, stall,
5lift, dive, sweep in a slow
loose-knotted breeze, I watch
the lineations of the dance, air’s
least-holding script, whose
figures carve on my retina
10motions the mind mulls over
and subdues to
intelligible reticula, informing shapes.
1981
White Passages
Peaks and rivers, cold
soggy passes, declivities,
willows
in the quartermoon river bends,
5stalk-dead
row
willows high, moon-chalky
at floodline:
sparrows
10light on, walk out on
weedstalks to bleak heads’
enormous swaying,
skinny clouds running
the sun moonwhite.
A Way Away
Some spring thunderstorms, blunderingly
following on thaws, are so breezy
they get an old leaf
up that falling into updrafts
5can’t get down:
the wind will, leaping
out of held moil, lift
the leaf higher than did any
tree
10and the leaf in the chancy
currents will wobble
like a butterfly
and gravity will seem to lose
trace of it, and it will
15angle up till wandering off you
forget to notice if it ever lands.
1984
Pots and Pans
So what if the reality
out there’s inert
(though the brook flows on)
until
5imagined and, imagined,
changed,
transfused and
tinctured,
made out
10in glassy, mirroring
human separations:
still, the ground base
appears much more
differentiated than
15brook shale or grist tailings,
the reality
out there includes,
as we suppose,
have gained the careful
20intricacy
to suppose,
consequential and random
sequences, organizations
into high points
25from which all men may
at whatever height
of imagination learn:
unless there is a place,
where is such a
30place and how
could it be,
empty, paradisal,
a still point from
which, all things
35come together,
radiance glimmeringly
_________
emerges, or more
deeply, from which
the coming in
40and going
out of things has
lost distinction:
then the reality
found there, empty,
45seems like a place
the mind made
though the mind
imagines it found it
there first and
50then perceiving it
“came into it”—
rippling gamelans
build imperceptible
stillnesses
55just over their
bongs and
clinks, an emptiness
as of figured
light, a permanence
60the mind’s home.
1981 (1984)
Aquarium Watch
Surfaced, the snail pokes
a tube into the air
and takes in a shell full:
when he gets too much
5and, let go to sink,
floats, trapped weightless,
he measures and measures,
as if studying, then
tilts and a single
10sized bubble escapes the shell rim:
and down he goes, as if
dreaming gravity’s smoothest dream.
Earliest Recollection
Thaws snow-clear the fields
and woods, and leaves
snow’s small weight
touched down last fall
5crinkle to the breezes
and rise gathering dry
to dash about, whirl
with the liveliness
of the dead re-winded,
10the end of stories not their
story’s end,
everything
else too naked to
swish or starkly sway and
15nothing else free to travel.
1981
Liquidities
The biosphere waterbased
figurations here—
leaves, flies, flakes—
durance is as it were
5uphill against the wind,
prolificacy profligate,
prolix strewings like
showers shedding windy out
of spruce woods after storm
10(though it’s only spring,
already showers
from the tiny-seeded maple
of go
ldenheaded tadpoles,
woven tails sprinkling
15wet asphalt)—staying
is offish, dropping into
underbrush of established
woods, the chance a
chance blow will
20twist something rotten off
or a fire quick clear
shading out density of limb
and vine—or even if
chance allows the hold
25life, the crest of the
hill comes, the wind shifts,
gravity pulls the heldback
motions apart, the motions water.
1979 (1986)
Surgeons
The debranching foot-wide wound
that lightened the big siberian
elm has mooned into
the second summer,
5shiny with sap and slick
meal lanky
worms and maggots have,
tunneling, mapped
and beetles have
10stood sipping
in: but yesterday’s
damaging winds and
downpour scrubbed the wound
scum-clean, and now
15the old news
of its
growth shines in staffs
of round music
bright to exact count’s
20interval and ring.
1985
Motion’s Holdings
The filled out gourd rots, the
ridge rises in a wave
height cracks into peaks, the peaks
wear down to low undoings whose undertowing
5throws other waves up: the branch
of honeysuckle leaves arcs outward
into its becoming motion but,
completion’s precision done, gives
over riddling free to other
_________
10motions: boulders, their green and white
moss-molds, high-held in moist
hill woods, stir, hum with
stall and spill, take in and give
off heat, adjust nearby to
15geomagnetic fields, tip liquid with
change should a trunk or rock loosen
to let rollers roll, or they loll
inwardly with earth’s lie
in space, oxidize at their surfaces
20exchanges with fungal thread and rain:
things are slowed motion that,
slowed too far, falls loose, freeing debris:
but in the ongoing warps, the butterfly
amaryllis crowds its bowl with bulbs.
1985
Burnout in the Overshoot
The first cool spell has
cracked the white asters open,
samples here and there,
and tomorrow’s promised warmth will
5stir a few bees loose:
there’s something besides
death and nothingness
even if winter is coming:
and, anyway, death isn’t
10a place you get all the way
to: as you arrive
what is arriving
_________
diminishes and
finally, touch to touch,
15nothing is equal to nothing.
1979 (1984)
Telling Moves
The hawk before the dusk storm
drops into,
rounding out a stoop
the same
5as ever, but I’m
no longer true:
the willow’s gold’s green again,
wept branch-withes
floating as if
10away on gusts, flared
fountains, but I’m
not getting things right:
the old fall
off in a doze or,
15frozen to a kind of interest,
meet the pain presentably,
but I’m
not standing out in any clearing:
hawk and willow, the stilt-right
20arrivals of the old:
the grave, I cannot accept it,
there is no way to give it up.
1979 (1986)
Coming Round
The oar squeaks,
a dash sound like
moon-hustle on the river:
reeds
5trap and ease the
boat slow
to ripple-tilting sanddown:
the night, a
bubble,
10hangs two hundred
thousand miles by
a moon-filament:
I tie up, head for the single
windowlight:
15I cut the moon free.
1984 (1985)
Recoveries
The universe loosens, disperses,
dissolves away until its
veils, drifted fine, sway entangling
on themselves into new knots
5of concentration & high
condition: meanwhile, in the
immediate system shelving
away, there must be constant
throwing off, cutting back
_________
10to hold the firm
defined: genetic material’s
extravagant loss along the
edging peripheries of accident,
poor formation, mischance,
15unwholesome surprise must be
defended against, compensated for—
where does the tiny whining,
insisting energy come from that
sings stuff back together,
20resilient threads, bends, promoting
shape through time: though
the universe is dissolving,
minor countermotions mix
out from which are derived
25flares of form, modes of slim
continuance, mounting
lofts, mingling seed.
(1984)
Trivial Means
We don’t want to be just
the narrows or shambles through which
great motions make their way:
we want to know why or how
5the motions stirred first
and whether their moves are
prefigured or moment-to-moment
providentiality and surprise:
we make capability’s show
_________
10of discerning outline,
of recognizing and measuring
true, and we don’t understand why,
servants to flesh, we must also
subserve realization, knowing no
15more than we find out and only when
we can, death merely breaking us
away from that: the elements don’t reply,
not on a day like this,
wide openness the blue cage, though
20they jar at times, report, drown,
strike: this language spoken in
lives under overpassings of necessity.
1979 (1986)
Tracing Out
What buoys the butterfly,
the world’s
weight, I project: slow
motions of the bleakest
5metals and stones
suggest, like an
intelligence, the undeniable
possibility; on that,
the wind,
10thread muscles and plastic
joints, the butterfly jounces:
but lightness, like making
sense, is just more of
the world’s weight
15momentarily fined:
tissues of sense, spun out
of sense filaments,
become clumpy trees, roll
jungles under: bound way away:
20the world’s weight’s the world’s.
1982 (1985)
Some Any
What do you have if you can’t waste it,
what good is it if you have to dam it
up to dip it out,
<
br /> what is anything worth if not so
5common it isn’t worth anything,
why fool with anything so scarce you
have to be grateful for it,
why if surprised you had a thought today
bother to think at all
10when the thought is as best itself
plentiful and dirt cheap,
why love at all if diminishing love you
have only enough for Tuesday,
who needs anything he really needs,
15where could the necessary be found if
not anywhere where where
1975 (1986)
Memory
When everything is leveled off
even with the ground
will a brier or reed
figure
5us up to the light again:
where so little’s made of
difference
will we
recover immortality’s mindfulness
10in a shoot’s leaf:
from indifference will we
put together enough
yearning
to gouge the dark loose: or when
15sand skins the ground