by A. R. Ammons
calico, not a chat, but tabby, putting the
chipmunk down by the day-lilies, hardly yet having
their days, on the back hedge and then in
925thrusting gulps and crunches downing chippy:
it is the law of the jungle we have learned so
much from: but some would say the purpose of
living is to serve others or rule them, or to
write music, and some would say that being alive
930is like being dead, but I would say that the
purpose though it might not always—or but
seldom—come through is still being alive: I’m
a little shook up about the chipmunk: the other
day just before sunset, I watched him for
935several minutes as he sat near the steps on the
backporch in the full sun and looked around a
bit now and then with an, taking in an, unprecedented
leisure and pleasure, the sunlight nearly coming
clear pink through his ears and forefeet: times
_________
940sometimes darken before dark: I’m running too many
threads and dropping too many stitches in this
weaving which is about, what, life and, mais oui,
death, wildlife and broken (tamed) verse: the
rabbit knows that if he doesn’t like it here he
945can’t just go off somewhere else to live: so
he carefully dissolves from panic and nibbles
a sprig of weed, eases into a forward move,
and lives in fear: not helplessly, but in the
knowledge of his capabilities, his devices, his
950bounces and split swerves: and he has young to
beget and young to raise and this without
benefit of tenure, estate, living trust, term
insurance, or social security: he is naked every
minute to clover tip or onslaught; onslaught
955here meaning being chewed up: garbage disposal
has become more sweetly if broadly waste disposal
and guess what’s two percent of permanent waste,
yep, disposable diapers, good to last
five hundred years: cute little babies’ shit:
960rambling thunderstorms in morning’s blue darknesses—
such poetry, drumming and puddling:
snakes of currency head up and head out down
the driveway and off the sidewalk into the
spearmint: the sky whams and bangs, splits
965with light: dense rain shuts out the trees
_________
that reappear ghostly in a drizzle: birds, animals
lie quiet (birds twig up), enduring’s acceptance, the
waiting out of the passage: reminding me of
Ole Liz who used to work in the fields—when
970the big afternoon thunderheads found
her out cropping tobacco, she’d say, “When the
Lawd work, Ole Liza gone sit down”—and she would
not work while the majestic procedures of hail
and heaven went by: well-fed, the cat tucks in
975feet, brings tail around, and dozes right out
in the open where the prey can be totally puzzled
by his indifference: prey move warily into this
ambiguity with a brave speculation, learning not
always to be terrified by a presence: and just
980then, of course, or soon after, maybe even not
until the next morning, the dozing ends, and
if he doesn’t look out so ends poor chipmunkey:
keep the open stare of the chill factor in warmth:
even in the midst of passion plant the seed
985whose vine or tree may hang you: things
not followed as risks are risky: being alive
means being alive to mischance’s chances.
10
in your end is my beginning, I repeat; also,
my end; my end is, in fact, your end, in a way:
_________
990are we not bound together by our ends: and when,
end to end, our ends meet, then we begin to
see the end of disturbing endlessness: unity
does what unity can: while preserving two
it accords in mutuality a mist wonderfully and
995onefully coming together in—ah—well, why
entail sophistry: air and earth join, as you have
often read, via sculpted stone on a high platform
of the Old Peak: weight at great height fines
out into a kind of buoyance and one’s feet feel
1000slippery and groundless: the material
spiritualizes and lock stone and air meet
cordially with a high lust clamping one to the other:
I must be at the crux of the matter: I do not
feel I can go on: progression lies down in the
1005ditches of inpouring doubt: I think of this tape
(this is another tape, a little wider, just about
pentameter) as the showboat churning down the
Mississippi with the banks, the fast currents,
the sandbars, drenchings; that is, it is going
1010down, like it or not, and I am like an analyst
or critic of action or behavior; I am saying,
is she into her depth; did she pack in enough
fuel to make it; shouldn’t you nudge the bow
a touch starboard: and such like: such
1015as, why is she doing this; where did
_________
she, and when, acquire this sense of mission:
I know boats don’t have senses of mission:
but you were going along with it, weren’t you:
I’m afraid a yaw will get out of hand
1020and the stern will swing around on the bow, and
we’ll be wheeling in reverse, as if in
reverse, in order to progress forward backward:
it doesn’t really matter: hurricanes have hit
inland far enough to drive boats of any size
1025right up on river shores: and boats have had to
wait weeks, at times, for rain or for a wall
arriving downstream from a flood elsewhere:
I read Life on the Mississippi a long time ago
and those boats were harder to steer than this:
1030still, it’s rough for anyone in a fog, and
mark twains all over the place are hardly
reassuring: but it’s okay: we’re going far
away soon into space, and ships will roll
and enmeshments of asteroids or stellar dust
1035confuse speed: it doesn’t matter: we’ll get
seed off this primordial hulk before we drown
it in throwaways: we have a spirit that
clears after every stupidity, designs treads for
offroaders, matches the right bacterium to the
1040right poison: I just wish neanderthal were still
here: I would have loved those rugged little
_________
four-foot fellows: imagine having a nest
of workers down in the basement, sturdy little
whippersnappers to run errands: first thing you
1045know the muvahs are fucking your mother, in laws,
so, so much for neanderthals’ brisk hard nuts: I
think I’m at the crux right now: I can hardly think
or think of hardly a thing to say: I’ve searched
my mind for swerves of narrative, minor
1050assemblages of incident on a string, emblems of
the shapes of actions, the essential displaying
the newspapery: sometimes, just when you think
the spirit is going to rise, something else does:
life, life is like a poem: the moment it
1055begins, it beg
ins to end: the tension this
establishes makes every move and moment, every
gap and stumble, every glide and rise significant:
for if life or poem went dribbling endlessly
on, what identifiable arc or measure could it
1060clarify: within limits the made thing accepts
its revelation and dissolution, its coming and
going, beginning and ending, being and nonbeing:
the poem moves through the smooth or astonished
beginning, the taking on of engagement and
1065complication, the gathering up of direction and
possibility, and the falling out and fading
away: this is all so reasonable, we sometimes
_________
wonder why grief tells us so we wanted to cling
to being, the good things, oh, the good things,
1070but in real life as in real poems clarifying
form, such as the beginning and ending of the
trip to Mexico (with the middle at San Miguel
de Allende, double-middled by a week in Mexico
City) are minor forms within larger constructs
1075not so clear: big segments crack off—say,
when you moved from Allentown to Albuquerque
or when the divorce first was named—giving
you impressions, among others, of irrelevancies,
hacked up intuitions, but also false, to some
1080extent, notions of recency—your late departure,
the house you just sold—and when that is
blanked out of memory, life is shortened and
you are young in a new time, pure local lyrics
coexistent with what appears to be a whole
1085shambles, the shambles questioning the lyric
out of easy shape, and the lyric providing
intervals of symmetry in the jumbled enlargement,
but it is subservient when art imitates life;
art makes life, just as it makes itself, an
1090imitation: art makes shape, order, meaning,
purpose where there was none, or none discernible,
none derivable: life, too, if it is to have
meaning, must be made meaningful: if it is to
_________
have purpose, its purpose must be divined, invented,
1095manifested, held to: a wallow is a wallow:
who knows: everything here may be meaninglessly
prevalent so as to give us the potential of
making’s range: when we bawl over our
predicament we merely accuse ourselves: why
1100must we answer up to reality, when we can
axle reality into our illusions: not
delusional illusions but just the “turn”
toward the possible, the hope, the trust, the
belief: oh, well: argument is like dining:
1105mess with a nice dinner long enough, it’s garbage.
11
an early June morning in early June, we, having
already gone out to breakfast, pop into the red
Toyota Tercel and breeze down the hill by Lake
Cayuga to the farmers’ market, so bright, so
1110clear, rows and rows of cars and stalls and,
beyond, boats docked calm on the glassy inlet:
the people look a little ruffled, like yards
trying to come out of icebound winters into
springs, the old stalks still there, the space
1115of the new stuff not filled out: affliction
here, where the heavy woman, heavier than last
fall, leans over to swish one knock-knee past
_________
(check that rhyme) the other; affliction there,
where the wobble-legged man leans over into his
1120arm crutches, a four-legged progression: aging
women, drooped breasts under loose T-shirts,
hair making a virtue of snow-white or veering
off into an original expression of blue:
toothless, big-bellied, bald, broad-rumped,
1125deaf: the afflicted, hurts hurting but less
than they hurt at home or, if hurting more,
with some compensation: one absolutely lovely
person, perhaps: the radiance of some babies’
faces, the perfect interest of some boy in mud
1130puddles: and this is all under the aspect of
eternity, soon to be: but listen to the
good-mornings and how’ve-you-beens and
were-you-away-any-of-the-winters, along with
the hanging baskets of fuchsia, purple and red
1135and streaked white, tuberous begonias with the
freshest colors alive, bread, and stall after
stall of vegetables, goat cheese, honey, coffee
plus a live minnequin who is moved to thank you
by coins and bills dropped in a hat: this is
1140we at our best, not killing, scheming, abusing,
running over, tearing down, burning up: why
did invention ever bother with all this, why
does the huge beech by the water come back every
_________
year: oh, the sweet pleasures, or even the hope
1145of sweet pleasures, the kiss, the letter from
someone, the word of sympathy or praise, or just
the shared settled look between us, that here
we are together, such as it is, cautious and
courageous, wily with genuine desire, policed
1150by how we behave, all out of eternity, into
eternity, but here now, where we make the most
of it: I settle down: I who could have used
the world share a crumb: I who wanted the sky
fall to the glint in a passing eye: the crack
1155in the dome of knowledge, the aperture, so to
say, poetically speaking, into faith is, of
course, as everyone knows, the magical exception
to the naturalistic rule: derivations (pharmacological?)
from nature do what they can, usually
1160with terrible side effects or with disjunctivitis
with other drugs (with, with) but one exception
as in rising in a fiery go-cart is lustfully
believed to overturn, or else to buoy, all
naturalism, by which is intended to be meant
1165sense, common and unusual varieties, science,
knowledge, craft: there is a web-worm falls
sometimes aslant the honeysuckle hedge in spring
breeze or other dislocation and finds itself
asquirm dangerously dangled in the open air (I’ve
_________
1170seen hornets trim those babies right out of the
air): this one I paused to view was wrestling
up the single thread of web, nipping and tucking,
reaching up for a hold on the tight and bringing
itself up till the bit length could be added
1175to the tiny cotton ball gathered at its
head: but this is mere mechanics: down its
back was a purplish streak exactly the color
of honeysucklebushlimbstems, the top part (buds)
of the stems: his feet, his laterals, were
1180exactly the color of the lateralhoneysucklebush
limbstems: while this waits explanation, I
hold it a sufficient miracle, on which, tho,
I posit no faith of a kind but faith of another
kind: that is, maybe some spooky agency does
1185manage all: we’re attracted to stars not because
they’re confessional but because of the roles
they create into play; we’re attracted to
pretend, not fact, first: then, the clothing
of creativity about the person attr
acts us to
1190his sins: we are awed and want the clay feet
to stop walking over us: also we want better
to understand how to reach this creativity’s
sinfulness ourselves: so why can’t poets
speak in tongues, others than their own; is
1195truth in the fact or in the persuasion, in the
_________
credible action or the flat statement: I don’t
care whether anybody believes me or not: I
don’t know anything I want anybody to believe
in: but if you will sit with me in the light
1200of speech, I will sit with you: I would rather
do this than eat your ice cream, go to a movie,