The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2

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