The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2

by A. R. Ammons

  (here on the 10th it is so late into spring

  it is nearly early summer: the big days turn,

  hardly wobbling in time for a couple of weeks or

  so around this widest day): the anthill has

  1485erupted gray-dry in the grass and the little

  black buggers are circulating outside and inside

  tunnels, as in cave weather or meshwork

  digestive, arterial systems; the universe, you

  may know, may be backed up like water behind a

  1490dam, and it may spill, as it already has from

  ten to four dimensions, still lower anyday: still

  the world is not a show consciousness can pull

  off or wipe out: because consciousness can neither

  wipe out nor actualize it it is not a show but

  1495the world: if one does not eat perception-blasted

  potato, one will blast perception by the loss of

  perception: starch (in Arch) in the potato

  meets with my chemistry to enliven my chemistry,

  clear my eyes, harden, perhaps, my muscle, wag

  1500my tongue (almost certainly): hallelujah: if

  death is so persuasive, can’t life be: it is

  fashionable now to mean nothing, not to exist,

  _________

  because meaning doesn’t hold, and we do not exist

  forever; this is forever, we are now in it: our

  1505eyes see through the round time of nearly all

  of being, our minds reach out and in ten billion

  years: we are in so much forever, we pay it no

  mind, we’d rather think of today’s shopping or

  next week’s day off: but we will not be in

  1510forever forever, that is the dropout: is it

  too much to be in forever a while: dead we are

  out of time and forever, both: I want to get

  around to where I can say I’m glad I was here,

  even if I must go: I want to believe that the

  1515possibility given me to be here was not a betrayal

  or trap or hoax but a trial of the possibility

  of a possibility, that I can find firm grounds

  for thinking what I want to think as well as

  for despair, incoherence, distrust, drifting

  1520acedia: nonreferentiality is a referentiality

  of nonreferentiality: slap the world any way,

  it flaps back: turn the dial past zero, it’s

  back to one: nonrepresentation is a representation

  of nonrepresentation: things are awash in

  1525ideality: ideal meaninglessness, ideal absurdity,

  ideal ideals: we want to know the reality of

  these perfectly, ideally, as themselves: poems

  that give up the ideal of making sense do not

  _________

  give up the ideal of not making sense: nom de

  1530plumage best feathers a nest egg, ivory doorknob:

  15

  what are we to think of the waste, though: the

  sugarmaple seeds on the blacktop are so dense,

  the seedheads crushed by tires, the wings stuck

  wet, they hold the rains, so there’s no walkway

  1535dry: so many seeds, and not one will make a

  tree, excuse the expression: what of so much

  possibility, all impossibility: how about the

  one who finds alcohol at eleven, drugs at seventeen

  death at thirty-two: how about the little

  1540boy on the street who with puffy-smooth face and

  slit eyes reaches up to you for a handshake:

  supposing politics swings back like a breeze and

  sails tanks through a young crowd: what about the

  hopes withered up in screams like crops in

  1545sandy winds: how about the letting out of streams

  of blood where rain might have sprinkled into

  roadpools: are we to identify with the fortunate

  who see the energy of possibility as its necessary

  brush with impossibility: who defines meaning

  1550only in the blasted landfalls of no meaning:

  who can in safety call evil essential to the

  differentiations of good: or should we wail

  _________

  that the lost are lost, that nothing can be right

  until they no longer lose themselves, until we’ve found

  1555charms to call them back: are we to take no

  comfort when so much discomfort turns here and

  there helplessly for help: is there, in other

  words, after the balances are toted up, is there

  a streak of light defining the cutting edge as

  1560celebration: (clematis which looks as dead and

  drained in winter as baling wire transports in

  spring such leaves and plush blooms!) I walked

  down the hall to the ward-wing surrounded on

  three sides with windows’ light and there with

  1565the other diabetics like minnows in the pool-head

  of a tidal rising sat my father slumped,

  gussied up with straps, in a wheelchair, a catheter leading

  to the little fuel tank hung underneath, urine

  the color of gasoline, my father like the

  1570others drawn down half-asleep mulling over his

  wheels: where, I thought, hope of good is gone

  evil becomes the deliverer, and more evil, to get

  one through to the clearing where presence, now

  pain, enters oblivion: my father roused himself

  1575and took some hope in me but then left me back

  alone: at a point in evil, evil changes its

  clothes and death with a soft smile crooks its

  finger to us: a taking by death leaving the

  _________

  living bereft: such a mixture! where does a steady

  1580formulation settle down: what integration

  of wisdom holds scoured by the bottoms of . . .

  bottoms? . . . questioned, I mean, by nibbling

  exception and branching direction: every balance

  overbalances: judiciousness loses the excitement

  1585of error: realizing that there is no safety

  is safety: the other side of anything is worth

  nearly as much as the side: the difference

  so slight in fact, that one goes out to see if

  it is there: I want a curvature like the

  1590arising of a spherical section, a sweep that

  doesn’t break down from arc into word, image,

  definition, story, thesis, but all these

  assimilated to an arch of silence, an interrelation

  permitting motion in stillness: I want to see

  1595furrows of definition, both the centerings of

  furrow and the clumpy outcastings beyond: I do

  not want to be caught inside for clarity: I

  want clarity to be a smooth long bend

  disallowing no complexity in coming clean: why

  1600do I want this, complexity without confusion,

  clarity without confinement, time in time, not

  time splintered: if you are not gone at a certain

  age, your world is: or it is shriveled to a

  few people who know what you know: aunts and

  _________

  1605uncles with their histories blanked out, the thick

  tissue of relationships erased into one of emptiness

  or maybe your cousins, too, are gone, and

  the world has starved to a single peak,

  you and what you know alone, with no one

  1610else in the world to nod recognizing what you

  say and recall without explanation: so, have

  your choice to leave the world or have it leave

  you; either way you c
hoose will bring the same

  result, nothingness and the vanishment of

  1615what was: over and over the world rolls in this

  wise, so much so that people stricken with these

  knowledges think the aspiration to win to be

  remembered, to be let hanging, dibbling in the

  minds of those continuing: but life is not first

  1620for being remembered but for being lived! how

  quaint and sad the lives of those who have lived

  but are gone, the vacant sadness of two eternities

  pressed together, squeezing them dry to

  nondegradable remnants—trash: the meaning,

  1625the tears, loves, sweet handholdings, all

  the fears, jealousies, hangings, burnings—

  throwaways, obsolescences that plug up

  the circulations today, burdening the living

  with guilty obligations of memory and service:

  1630to have the curvature, though, one needs the

  concisions of the local, contemplations such as

  how to slice a banana for breakfast oatmeal,

  fourteen thick or thirty-three thin events, the

  chunky substance of fourteen encounters or the

  1635flavor availabilities in limp circles: fly the

  definite lest it lock you in! have solvent by

  should the imperative devise you a vice: see

  a spread of possibilities, not an onion plot:

  the juggler has twice as many balls as hands

  1640because it’s all up in the air: keep it up

  in the air, boundingly like ephemera at dusk:

  or dawn: I saw in Carolina morning flies

  midair like floating stones: the dew, heavy;

  the sun, blood red: a road dipping round a

  1645pine grove down a hill to a pond, the spillway

  clogged with cattails bent with breezes and with

  redwings awilding day: a crippled old farmer

  up early with his dog, noon likely to melt tar,

  a benchlong of old blacks at the crossroads

  1650gas station, dogfennel high on the woods’ edge,

  some scraggly roastnear corn used up, tomato

  plants sprawled out, become vines: morning,

  gentlemen, how you all doing: these bitty

  events, near pangs commonplace on this planet

  1655so strangely turned out, we mustn’t take on so

  but let the music sway, the rhetoric ride, the

  _________

  garbage heave, for if we allow one solid cast

  of grief to flip and filter away into all the

  trinklets it might go, we would be averaged

  1660down to a multiple diminishment like acceptance:

  but we mean to go on and go on till we unwind

  the winding of our longest road, when, we

  presume, the nothingness we

  step to will mirror treasures we leave, a

  1665strange mirror, everything in our lives having

  taken root in love, the sequences having become

  right because that is the way they had to run:

  but, then, for the trouble of love, we may be

  so tired that indifference will join ours to the

  1670hills’ indifference and the broad currents of

  the deep and the high windings of the sky, and

  we may indeed see the ease beyond our

  understanding because, till now, always beyond

  16

  a bird dabbed me, a virgin soil, as I issued

  1675out under the open blue this morning, and

  thinking it beetle or moth, I brushed it off my

  shoulder and smeared do on one or more digits:

  my thoughts flew to geese dumps and the numbers

  of rafts of geese I’ve seen over unsoiled:

  1680do migrating geese not do do as they, sprinkling, go,

  or are they so high their droppings achieve

  _________

  vaporizing accelerations, like rocket launchers and

  reentry cones, often part solid: or are there

  not diarrhetic exceptions to control one might

  1685have seen splat or been shloshed by: so many

  specialities in our little knowledge: undone by

  do, I forged on, noting the eternity of the

  hill-line across the valley, uniting the ravines:

  from Mérida, I’d keep vaguely north along

  1690the valley, road and valley river tangling crossings,

  down to where the road tends to the west and

  rises back up toward the ridge before Valera:

  I would rest a bit there or take a plane—

  probably I would not take a plane but rent a

  1695burro and go the long, small road on down to

  Cabimas or Lago de Maracaibo, an excellent

  shore, unfailingly warm: is there intermediacy

  between hallucinatory flux and pure form’s rigid

  thought and count: between diarrhea and constipation,

  1700how about chunky intermediacy, some motion with

  minor forms clear, clusters or bindings, with the

  concomitant gaps, tie-offs and recommencements

  expected: could not a narrative be the speed

  and dimensions, feel, of a progression: and

  1705could there not be a blow away of emptiness:

  and a stasis, unmoving, unfeeling: impaction:

  a robin rows out of a tree across the road and

  _________

  bombs a couple of dabs on the blacktop, as if

  by dabs paying off flight: beads, actually:

  1710but hitting the ground, the beads compress into disks

  (little white disks) which peered into are alive

  with bellyroundworms, intricate, worky, lily-white

  flailing bellyworms, circumscribed in a sudden

  dessication without wings: squirrels stop at

  1715knotches to scratch and nuzzle: pests are all

  over, and inside: if you’ve derived from life

  a going thing called life, life has a right to

  derive life from you: ticks, parasites, lice,

  fleas, mites, flukes, crabs, mosquitoes, black

  1720flies, bacteria: in reality, reality is like

  still water, invisible, spiritual: the real

  abides, spiritual, while entities come and go:

  binds, warps, drives, with their accompanying

  marvels, beauties, goals, solutions misconstrue

  1725what we in time work out invisible again:

  roundabout gives us a place to go: turbulence

  livens our passion for clearing, clearing for

  turbulence: is the ring of truth, however clear

  and plain, superior to richness, to the beauty

  1730of gooey language densely managed: or is truth

  beauty, whenas so much truth is garbage by,

  if by nothing else, obsolescence, obsolescence,

  though, only a matter of habiliments, which are

  _________

  on and off, not essentials: poverty, burningly

  1735true, is not beautiful: order excusing cruelty

  is not beautiful but plenty truthful: mounds

  on held mounds as well as sinkholes and deep

  transgressions of trash are not beautiful:

  deformity, deviance, disease are often ugly,

  1740yet it must be said (it makes no nevermind to

  me if it makes no nevermind to you) that much

  good writing, for example—containing within

  itself, if not in its matter, its manner, much

  truth and beauty and beauty and truth—has

  1745derived under the resources of stressed attention

  or perilous need compensations not justifying

  suffering but smartening up a corner in it her
e

  and there: things that go around sometimes go

  around so far around they come back around: if you

  1750like my form, experience my function: doctors

  lose all their patients, help often barely

  distinguishable from the forwarding: tone with

  an undertow: obscure verse—am I supposed to

  understand that I’m not supposed to understand

  1755it or not: some of these short guys are so

  wellhung they’d give an inch off their dicks

  if they could put it under their heels, and you

  could jack down some of these tall guys a foot

  if they could move into another inch: and the