by A. R. Ammons
_________
1760skinny-hipped women, double full moons up front
while with some of these big rears, they don’t
have enough to stick your lips to: these wayward
compensations reaching squandering extremes:
beauty is so much in demand it’s a wonder natural
1765selection hasn’t thinned out anything not perfectly
beautiful: but nature, if I may speak for it,
likes a broad spectrum approaching disorder so
as to maintain the potential of change with
variety and environment: the true shape of
1770perfect beauty, hard to find, somehow floats
implicit and stable there among the shorties,
flopsies, big-legged, limpy, skew-faced, etc.
and if any change comes along it’s going to
find a possibility to jump on, you wait and see,
1775or I’m the biggest fool in the county: for
perfect beauty, narrowed down and reproduced,
might be a frail shield to an avalanche of
reorganization: I wonder if in the mind’s
control of pain, the point of the farthest
1780projection draws in the sweetest ether,
disestablishes the local, perhaps internal,
crossing constructs, alleviates the focus of
the inwardly immediate, releasing sights of mind
into range’s most easeful extreme: what design
1785ypointing could bring the stars answering news,
_________
a ray so far and fine it, perhaps converging,
never closes on infinity, needle of the subtlest
conveyance: except if one needed to turn aside
to daily cares or, conceivably, joys, how
1790could one disjoint, decommission a headful of
spires, or get back from the most distant
contemplation of a single spire: the local
forms and bursts, releasing the immediate,
though: I watched last fall a squirrel over by
1795the ivy bank by the university, a scrap of his
tail lost to a scrap, dig up a nut, roll it
round like a tool to his chippy teeth, the other
end from the scrappy tail grown fat and frizzly
white for winter, that warm, sunny morning in
1800early December: a fat coward, a territorial
bout, flight, and everything kept except a bit
(or bite) of tail, and a feast that morning in
a tranquillity of university ivy: (time allows
edgings into so many forms of reality, we let
1805them all go, they go anyway, but we keep some
images and think how quick the bridge was from
what was there to what was not, so quick a
bridge it flows, a river of bridges, making and
bursting, leaping and settling down, sidling
1810into a pure extreme and middling back to its
other’s mix: song’s buoyance underlofts
_________
anything and plays, sways it, puts it into play,
sheds the rigor of its stasis, makes forms wash
and even, playing, forms washes: anything,
1815anything, anything is poetry: effortlessness
keys the motion; it is a plentiful waste and
waste of plenty: no let up: there is a
maundering rover way up that like the jet stream
wanders down engaging its plenty with the
1820manifold, spraying energy into a million circuits
and circles, then playing through, regathering
and touching off again: this is awful, like
a descension of the gods, but, of course, there
are no gods but these, now, so it is not like
1825the gods, it is the gods: but I catch little
of the shine of such singings and prowlings; my
poetry is strawbags full of fleas the dogs won’t
sleep on or rats rummage: I am the abstract inexact’s
chickenfeed: I am borderlines splintered down
1830into hedgerows: I am the fernbrake ditches
winter brown, the shaggy down springs’ flows
accrue: but think what it would be like to get
every word in, to trickle every rhythm in and
the overrhythms curling, lagging, eddying along
1835a network of motional obbligatos: imagine
getting all the elements in (including the
element of surprise), the axis each philodendron
_________
leaf takes to the window, gathering it up round
and dumping it where it belongs in the sweeping,
1840the unheard, the unspent, that which is around
the edges of whatever may be: everything
assimilated to star-ypointing song: would that
not ease the mind, if discommode breakfast,
unhinge federal taxation): one reads of
1845travelers to the isles and continent and it’s
castles, paintings, abbeys, cabs, and
callings-on (all that antedated western slop)
but who reports taking a leak or blithely oozing
a porch fart—well, it seems okay to mention
1850constipation (the higher morality) because
nobody ever goes, or can: when those bannered
armies assembled in the dawn to the earliest
clarions or meagerest quiet of the other camp,
had the respective parties already dookied in
1855the woods (something saved for battle): did
they do at the same places in the woods, a
centering constellation, or were there hills
from the top of which and down the sides of
which tumbled the goods to deep gatherings: we
1860are primates: apes: we’re meat wrapped round
knotchbone spine: we can’t untangle ourselves
productively from stalwart lacing, bone, artery,
nerve compact but, turned around, there is the
_________
spiritual face, thoughts lightbeam light,
1865twinklings like minnows surfacing waves, the
rosy rushes that rouge or loft flesh, the
interface of meat and madness, love and lumbar:
it is, I think, remarkable that we are here in
the form of apes: mulling apes: walky apes:
1870but Newton, a lone one in his room, flowed
figure into calculus that found on a sheet of
paper the slow Saturn fell into passing Jupiter:
this kind of ape will join his fellows in a
dirty street and hack another fellow who has
1875done ungroupliness to death, axe him right
in the pleading face and let him bleed reconciled:
purity of cluster will override good or bad in
us: I have a low view of us: but that is why
I love us or try to move to love us: this
1880afternoon at the center downtown an old
violinist stood before 25 or 30 children, all
violinists, from 5 to, say, 11, and they played
together almost stilted sharp and classical: a
black child, all types of Asian, white—there
1885together, their bows striding in synch: the
mild trance in absented faces, the inner study
of outer music: a holiness, the same music
flowing through all of them, they all observing
the sway: I’m a goofball all right, one of
_________
1890the hurt, one of the criers, one of the shaken
lovers: if love were likely it would not be
love: the ape squats to his business in the
woods and if a snake doesn’t approach him
effluence of
stars may ghostly appear fine-tuning
1895his nerves, daze him with dazzle magic: may
the gods or appetitive ganglions grant us,
mornings, the long grays, a run, a winding,
lane, trail, stone fence, narrative, coffee
shop, a will not to fall inward, slow, ease
1900still: a lively possibility like a rocky brook near
birches, a lean swerve, a trout’s dorsal in
stone-water, a point, ever, of vigorous
answering, as with a click beetle, the rotary
narrowing by which a squirrel shucks a spruce
1905cone: not to fan out like a melt stream fading
into a valley, too thin a stream to cut its
gathering onward, not the blank wall backing a
shallow cave: preying, one thing on another,
and praying, one for another: sinister issues
17
1910the heap of knickknacks (knickknackatery),
whatnots (whatnotery), doodads, jews-harps,
belt buckles, do-funnies, files, disks, pads,
pesticide residues, nonprosodic high-tension
_________
lines, whimpering-wimp dolls, epichlorohydrin
1915elastomers, sulfur dioxide emissions, perfume
sprays, radioactive williwaws: the people at
Marine Shale are said to be “able to turn
wastes into safe products”: but some say these
“products are themselves hazardous wastes”:
1920well, what does anybody want: is there a world
with no bitter aftertaste or post coitum triste:
what’s a petit mort against a high moment:
I mean, have you ever heard of such a thing:
what about genetically engineered microorganisms
1925and a bright future: where’s your faith, man:
try a little dirt, get a little tenderness: but
poetry is itself like the installation at Marine
Shale: it reaches down into the dead pit
and cool oil of stale recognition and words and
1930brings up hauls of stringy gook which it arrays
with light and strings with shiny syllables and
gets the mind back into vital relationship with
communication channels: but, of course, there
is some untransformed material, namely the poem
1935itself; the minute its transmutations end, it
becomes a relic sometimes only generations or
sets of century-wide generations can degrade:
a real stick in the fluencies: a leftover light
that hinders the light stream: poems themselves
_________
1940processing, revitalizing so much dead material
become a dead-material concentrate time’s
longest actions sometimes can’t dissolve: not
to worry: the universe is expected to return
and the heat concentrate then will ashen wispy poetry
1945wispier: actually, the planet is going to
be fine, as soon as the people get off: and
why bother with carcinogenic residues—one
solar flare (nova) will recall all to light:
I’ll tell you: I’m just not worried: in fact,
1950there is a saying that should be repeated in
piano interludes—don’t worry, be happy: hold
that thought, it is life’s best protection against
thought: when you can’t put something out of
the world, put it out of your mind: but don’t
1955just put something out of your mind—that leaves
a hole: put something you want to think about
in the hole and what that doesn’t fill it will
displace: happiness is like anything else: if
you get it you ought to have to make it: that
1960is why happiness is, according to B. Googe, like
money, which one also has to make (or steal or
inherit): our society has made it clear it
doesn’t much care how you get it: money is like
going to the cleaners, it comes back shiny,
1965spotless: why: because money is such an easy
_________
(if you have it) access to power; it negotiates
instantly into desire and as it spends its way
into satisfaction it is desire itself desiring
itself: remember—don’t sorry, be sappy: but
1970what money can’t buy, celebrity can: celebrity
renders more of its past harmless than any other
agency: you can get up there where if you don’t have
clay feet you ought to because otherwise you
impose on folks cruelly the burden of dealing with
1975your shining with no help from your screwups:
people above accusation’s harms should have
something to be accused of: if my past erupts
before me, now, I’ll pat it on the head and
have a milkbone with it: whimsies, gewgaws,
1980taradiddles, muffins, layer cakes, the time of
day to day: rains in the rainiest spring, with
six days to go, and sulfur-bright rings still
rim the puddles, so much pollen, the blue
spruce, its loft licked with cones: the right
1985time to write is when you have nothing to say,
your purview unrifted by the prejudice of personal
flows or ores, serenity which has balanced its
debits and credits annihilated, equanimity
circling without content or interruption:
1990beware the interests of the interested; theirs
might not include yours: take my word for it:
_________
when you come to something not worth saying,
you might as well say so and say it: still, I
wish that in the interclustering of formations,
1995motions, ridge-swerves, upclimbings, and downward
ramifications, there were a preferential path, not
just a pathology of one, but a statistically
broad road announcing “the way”—or does
compensation work right out to the extremest
2000degree, the middle way nothing but nothing and
the broad road too wide to declare a narrowing:
words are crepe paper, skinny skeins, tissues of
misrepresentation: it doesn’t matter if
they ding and dong, swirl up in ecstatic
2005windings: the true matter is without matter,
a sound nowhere heard, just beyond tangible windows
and doors: but paint the husks feather-bright
because they wither! poetry is not logic or
knowledge or philosophy; it is action and
2010action’s pleasure, but where does action end
and pleasure end, short of logic altogether,
not a dabble in theology, so airy and delightful:
you take even my old history teacher, his
commanding command of vocabulary was just part
2015of the trouble he couldn’t stop talking, now
he’s sitting in ward so and so, muttering: so,
put a period here and there, come around to a
_________
closure, give somebody else the word: shut up
reticence’s fullness in emptiness
18
2020should I go on, fearful of the phobias, strung
out, worried about the muttering asylums, working
the seams and veins of a fabric not designed to
be cut out as square as tapestry, seeking the
self-justifying inherences, the internal minglings
2025that might touch on a living center, and feeling
scared that the outer design is not predetermined
&nbs
p; and probably not to be found, all these isolated
sketches and componencies not subordinated, as
the government of large tracts necessitates, to
2030a single effect, one graspable object having
outline and shape, the entire register of millions
of events made available to a single key or tone
or image, a collection, a region mapped, defined
and named—North Dakota: but the binding squeezes
2035of rightangling, rectilinear propagations move
in at times too tightly or living, winding,
exfoliating centers and trim the spirit too
sharply back: you can’t classify except by
breaking down: some people say some things are