The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2

by A. R. Ammons

  worm: addling intensity at the center

  365where only special clothes and designated

  offices allay the risk, the pure center: but

  down, down on the lowest appropinquations, the

  laborsome, loaded vessels whine like sails in

  too much wind up the long ledges, the whines

  370a harmony, singing away the end of the world

  or spelling it in, a monstrous surrounding of

  gathering—the putrid, the castoff, the used,

  the mucked up—all arriving for final assessment,

  for the toting up in tonnage, the separations

  375of wet and dry, returnable and gone for good:

  the sanctifications, the burn-throughs, ash free

  merely a permanent twang of light, a dwelling

  music, remaining: how to be blessed are mechanisms,

  procedures that carry such changes! the

  380garbage spreader gets off his bulldozer and

  _________

  approaches the fire: he stares into it as into

  eternity, the burning edge of beginning and

  ending, the catalyst of going and becoming,

  and all thoughts of his paycheck and beerbelly,

  385even all thoughts of his house and family and

  the long way he has come to be worthy of his

  watch, fall away, and he stands in the presence

  of the momentarily everlasting, the air about

  him sacrosanct, purged of the crawling vines

  390and dense vegetation of desire, nothing between

  perception and consequence here: the arctic

  terns move away from the still machine and

  light strikes their wings in round, a fluttering,

  a whirling rose of wings, and it seems that

  395terns’ slender wings and finely-tipped

  tails look so airy and yet so capable that they

  must have been designed after angels or angels

  after them: the lizard family produced man in

  the winged air! man as what he might be or might

  400have been, neuter, guileless, a feathery hymn:

  the bulldozer man picks up a red bottle that

  turns purple and green in the light and pours

  out a few drops of stale wine, and yellowjackets

  burr in the bottle, sung drunk, the singing

  405not even puzzled when he tosses the bottle way

  down the slopes, the still air being flown in

  _________

  in the bottle even as the bottle dives through

  the air! the bulldozer man thinks about that

  and concludes that everything is marvelous, what

  410he should conclude and what everything is: on

  the deepdown slopes, he realizes, the light

  inside the bottle will, over the weeks, change

  the yellowjackets, unharmed, having left lost,

  not an aromatic vapor of wine left, the air

  415percolating into and out of the neck as the sun’s

  heat rises and falls: all is one, one all:

  hallelujah: he gets back up on his bulldozer

  and shaking his locks backs the bulldozer up

  5

  dew shatters into rivulets on crunched cellophane

  420as the newly-started bulldozer jars a furrow

  off the mesa, smoothing and packing down:

  flattening, the way combers break flat into

  speed up the strand: unpleasant food strings down

  the slopes and rats’ hard tails whirl whacking

  425trash: I don’t know anything much about garbage

  dumps: I mean, I’ve never climbed one: I

  don’t know about the smells: do masks mask

  scent: or is there a deodorizing mask: the

  Commissioner of Sanitation in a bug-black Caddy

  430hearse-long glisters creepy up the ziggurat: at

  _________

  the top his chauffeur pops out and opens the

  big back door for him: he goes over a few feet

  away, puts a stiff, salute-hand to his forehead

  and surveys the distances in all depths: the

  435birds’ shadows lace his white sleeve: he

  rises to his toes as a lifting zephyr from the

  sea lofts a salt-shelf of scent: he approves: he

  extends his arm in salute to the noisy dozer’s

  operator, waves back and forth canceling out

  440any intention to speak, re-beholds Florida’s

  longest vistas, gets back into the big buggy

  and runs up all the windows, trapping, though,

  a nuisance of flies: (or, would he have run

  the windows down: or would anyone else have:

  445not out there: strike that:) rightness, at

  any rate, like a benediction, settles on the

  ambiance: all is proceeding: funding will be

  continued: this work will not be abandoned:

  this mound can rise higher: things are in order

  450when heights are acknowledged; the lows

  ease into place; the wives get back from the laundromat,

  the husbands hose down the hubcaps; and the

  seeringly blank pressures of weekends crack

  away hour by hour in established time: in your

  455end is my beginning: the operator waves back

  to the Commissioner, acknowledging his understanding

  _________

  and his submission to benign authority, and falls

  to thinking of his wife, née Minnie Furher, a woman

  of abrupt appetites and strict morals, a woman

  460who wants what she wants legally, largely as a

  function of her husband’s particulars: a closet

  queen, Minnie hides her cardboard, gold-foiled

  crown to wear in parade about the house when

  nobody’s home: she is so fat, fat people

  465like to be near her: and her husband loves

  every bit of her, every bite (bit) round enough to get

  to: and wherever his dinky won’t reach, he finds

  something else that will: I went up the road

  a piece this morning at ten to Pleasant Grove

  470for the burial of Ted’s ashes: those above

  ground care; those below don’t: the sun was

  terribly hot, and the words of poems read out

  loud settled down like minnows in a shallows

  for the moment of silence and had their gaps

  475and fractures filled up and healed quiet: into

  the posthole went the irises and hand-holds of dirt:

  spring brings thaw and thaw brings the counterforce

  of planted ashes which may not rise again,

  not as anything recognizable as what they leach

  480away from: oh, yes, yes, the matter goes on,

  turning into this and that, never the same thing

  twice: but what about the spirit, does it die

  _________

  in an instant, being nothing in an instant out of

  matter, or does it hold on to some measure of

  485time, not just the eternity in which it is not,

  but does death go on being death for a billion

  years: this one fact put down is put down

  forever, is it, or for forever, forever to be a

  part of the changes about it, switches in the

  490earth’s magnetic field, asteroid collisions,

  tectonic underplays, to be molten and then not

  molten, again and again: when does a fact end:

  what does one do with this gap from just yesterday

  or just this morning to fifty-five billion

  495years—to infinity: the spirit was forever

  and is forever, the residual and informing

  energy, but here what concerns us is this


  manifestation, this man, this incredible flavoring and

  building up of character and éclat, gone,

  500though forever, in a moment only, a local

  event, infinitely unrepeatable: the song of

  the words subsides, the shallows drift away,

  the people turn to each other and away: motors

  start and the driveways clear, and the single

  505fact is left alone to itself to have its first

  night under the stars but to be there now

  for every star that comes: we go away who must

  ourselves come back, at last to stay: tears

  _________

  when we are helpless are our only joy: but

  510while I was away this morning, Mike, the young

  kid who does things for us, cut down the

  thrift with his weedeater, those little white

  flowers more like weedsize more than likely:

  sometimes called cliff rose: also got the grass

  515out of the front ditch now too wet to mow, slashed:

  the dispositional axis is not supreme (how tedious)

  and not a fiction (how clever) but plain (greatness

  flows through the lowly) and a fact (like as not)

  6

  a pain in the knee or hipjoint or warps and

  520knots in the leg muscles, even strange, binding

  twinges in the feet ought to cause you to include

  in the list of possibilities that that the high

  arch in one of your feet has slipped, shortening

  you shortlegged, your weight misdistributed,

  525your organs and moves skewed: of

  course, if you already had a broken arch in

  the other foot, then with both feet flat, you

  should notice a considerable improvement of

  sorts: if you were longlegged in one leg

  530and the foot of that leg went flat then you

  might be overwhelmed with improvement of still

  another kind: but, of course, if then the

  _________

  short leg shortened to a flat foot, you’d be

  back in dutch and puzzled by the consequences

  535especially if you knew nothing of the causes:

  things are sustained by interrelations and

  variety but when something goes wrong who

  can isolate the active cause, an

  active ingredient often riding in a complex of

  540contextual vectors: and nothing short of a

  laboratory experiment in which controlled

  circumstances can be evaluated one at a time

  is likely to prove limitingly clarifying: I

  was coming out of Goldwin Smith Hall after mail

  545call on a nova-bright late May day, the blues

  and greens outdoing each other, when a dear friend

  said, come and see, it’s Ralph, he’s in the car, and

  thinking, I’ve never been asked to come see

  Ralph before, I said, is anything the

  550matter, and she said, terminal cancer of the brain,

  and I said, terminal cancer of the brain, and

  she said, I found out a week ago, but don’t say

  anything to him: so, in the glaring light, his

  window rolled down, I was talking with an old friend

  555as if the past twenty-five years of all three of us

  as colleagues had shifted out of reach: everything

  is theater and eternity is nothing at

  all: yesterday, a man whose picture I’d just

  _________

  seen in the local paper was going into the basement

  560of Lincoln Hall when I said, I saw that piece

  about you in the paper, isn’t that an early

  retirement: I’m 63, he said: so’m I, I said:

  my wife isn’t well, he said, we want to travel;

  do you think about retiring: all the time, I

  565said, but to what: departments grow haired and blackhaired

  and shade away into white and dome-shine at the top:

  the dissolve moves through tenure, or a job elsewhere,

  part time, retirement, death: there never is

  a department really but a slow flow you can’t step

  570in twice: on writing a poem—you sit vacant and

  relaxed (if possible), your mind wandering

  freely, unengaged and in search of focus: you

  may sit this way for several minutes till the

  void unsettles you a bit and you become impatient

  575with the intrusion of an awareness of yourself

  sitting with a touch of unwelcome exasperation

  over a great blank: but you keep your mind

  open and on the move and eventually there is a

  trace of feeling like a bit of mist on a backroad

  580but then it reappears stronger and more central,

  still coming and going, so the mind can’t

  grab it and hold on to it: but the mind begins

  to make an effort, to shed from itself all

  _________

  awareness except that of going with the feeling,

  585to relax and hold the feeling—the feeling

  is a brutal burning, a rich, raw urgency:

  the mind knows that it is nothing without the

  feeling, so concentrating on the feeling, it

  dreams of imminent shapes, emergences, of

  590clust’ral abundances, of free flow, forms discernible,

  material, concrete, shapes on the move, and

  then the mind gives way from its triggering, and

  the mechanisms of necessity fall into, grasping the

  upheaval, the action of making; the presence

  595of pressure appears, forces open a way, the

  intensity heightens, groans of anguish and

  satisfaction break from the depths of the

  body, and the sweet dream occurs, the work

  payloads, the fall-away slips through, the body

  600contracts and returns, ease lengthens throughout

  the byways, and the mind picks up on the

  environment again, turns to the practical

  policing of the scene, restores itself to

  normalcy and the objective world, the body hitching

  605itself up on the way: shit fire (and save matches):

  we wheeled down the long glide from the mountains

  into Wheeling: morning fog smoked away the tops

  of hills and a river (or two) confluencing slashed

  across by scary iron bridges jammed the narrowed

  _________

  610valley road, when the big black mouth of a tunnel

  suddenly opened out of fog in solid rock, all the

  events at once happening in the shakes: but then going

  on down Route 7 along the Ohio; mammoth standings

  of steam, way out of size, too solid to vanish, oozed

  615up from the nuclear craters, so much so tall that even

  on our side of the river the outsized opal shades

  of steam broke across us, shadowing us once and again:

  slows like flying by or trying to drive to a mountain,

  the far ahead lingering far behind: the freeway of

  620refineries, chemical steams, the gross companies

  toughening the banks down by the banks of the O-hi-o.

  7

  is it all going to be like this: you wake up

  in the morning and there is that: the next

  morning, it’s something else, and none of it

  625makes much sense: and then one day the weight

  whomps down and you jack-spring onto a

  different floe or the road you were doing seventy

  on rumbles or runs out of road:

  meanwhile, baked potatoes are still fine,

  630split down the
middle, buttered up, the two white

  cakes steaming, the butter (or sour cream) oozing

  down and sex is, if any, good, and there’s that time

  between dawn and day when idle birds assert song

  _________

  whereas a little while later they’re quiet at

  635hunt or nest: and when during the drying out after

  rains the trickle in the ditch bottom

  quivers by a twig-built strait, the

  wonder of it all returns, the separations, ditches?

  ditches? rain?, a self?, a self?, being

  640here?, where?, here?, where’s here?, splits, slices,

  slits; quick-cut, overlapping dialog; a series of

  declining peaks; dwindlings of a woman’s bushy