The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2
Page 28
10even when they don’t
take it with them:
no economy of justice,
no sparing, no
payment for services rendered
15rolls this circus by:
you make your
mind up first to do it,
rain or shine, giving
or taking: you decide
20to decide to love:
then, here and there,
bit by burn, a nod, a
touch, smile, the sweet
love starts showing up.
1985 (1987)
Standing Light Up
Thunder grumbles, drops, thuds, breaking
down away (gravel-road rubble) the heads
hidden up in summer haze—and none of the
lightning’s veins shows: it could be mountains
5lost as much as clouds up there, and the sound
could be of equivalences coming down, avalanches
of stone, mud, snow, not just a front and all-day
soak making up—but so what, anything can be
with a little ink or wine produced: take the
10truth that in a drizzle drops tickle leaves so
it’s a pause whether it’s a breeze: who cares
about a truth like that: nearly all, maybe
all, most truth doesn’t matter a tittle of rubble
or rain: what matters is that sometimes the
15spirit halts and listens for what outleaps
the insides of summits thunder’s rumble has
never jarred: what is to be seen within
brightens the eye brighter than any lightning.
1981 (1985)
Establishment
To the eye the far ridge’s high slopes
are mist, boulders soaked through, blue
floating thin to white, not what the mind
asserts, hard rock skimmed over with brush
_________
5the lowering look-alike clouds have to give
to: the mind from the invitations, deceptions
contrives a regularum intervening, the moon,
sun-size, corrected slight: last week I was there
and the brush was trees and the terrain tense roots
10rockgrain refused till cracked and felt into.
Broad Brush
To the intricacy of the webbing, oh, good,
here come the broad, coarse, blunt, how
honorable they are, they walk with plunging
casualness, tearing without knowing
5through the spun fur of subtlety, and
cyclists put rubber on the road, turn
around and put down more, see who
can put down most, and the farmer plants
fire wild in the fall field’s shifty wind and
10breathes the smoke with an assurance of
wine bouquet and another farmer mounts the
combine and eats soybean dust for
hours (the phlegm, he says, digests it and
brings it up again) and good lord what room
15the round swearer gives the language, he
surrounds the possibilities of elegance, pours
bad beer into the roundness the words fly out
from: I’m tired of honed lines and high
wires and bickering niceties of balance:
20disc up an acre by mistake (it was already
seeded) split the rip saw through two or
_________
three grand poplars (tulip leaf and tulip
cone) and let us kick around unsure
and free, legislation so much milkweed silk.
(1992)
First Cold
Well, the white asters
are wide open (there’s
even a chicory
blossom or two
5left on a big weed)
but it’s too cold
for the bees to come:
every now and then
a snowflake
10streaks
out of the hanging gray,
winter’s first whitening:
white on white let it be,
then, flake
15to petal—to hold for a
minute or so: meanwhile,
golden bees are milling at
the door, to pour
out should that other
20gold, the sun, break in.
1987
Regards Regardless
We had something to do for a moment
with the eternity of things, we made
contact, the sweeps deeper than we
_________
knew, moving in and out without regard,
5we, bits, too little too brief to take
the awful informings in: age edges
us aside: we vacate offices (such as
listening for the loud, dull oriole
in May) to others whose earth earth’s
10becoming: but, aside, we note clearly,
having them separate again, bit from
power, second from time’s springs:
look, there goes eternity, still astir:
here are roses seen before: nothing’s
15to save us at last save loss itself:
even our gatherings, bits and pieces,
will with our central dissolving float
free, disordered, unaligned, the chairs
empty, our voices in none of the rooms:
20well, it was enough, even if nothing
came of it, no, it was something even
if it becomes nothing, the show turned
full round: freedom freely
enough allowed burns free, burns us free.
1979 (1986)
The Time Rate of Change
You mosey around, idling here and
there for years,
unaware that a waiting is hanging
out for you, and then one day
5you feel a light hindrance
like a floating, cut-away spider web
_________
touch your shoulder: and some
years later, perhaps, another,
still light but with a smallish
10tug to it, and then one day you
trip and catch in an entanglement like
direction, but the direction is
rope-loose and you don’t mind that
much: more years and a fine halter
15of dense constraints bites in,
and a kind of speed breaks out,
not just speed but acceleration, and
you begin to look back and also,
and with equal alarm, forward,
20and the speed picks up, the direction
narrows, and the speed is light’s.
1985 (1987)
Greeting Verses
What do I find right at the center of my interpersonal
relationships: a slightly dispersed but indisputably
tinctured core of brutality: go to the hospital
the question is not whether your life is at stake
5but whether you can pay the bill, guaranteeing it on
admission (or no admission) and proving it (or not getting
out) on release (if any): this bit of realism
clutches our floating values underneath like a bracket
under a bouquet: if someone pauses to
_________
10congratulate me on some slight nothing, I see the
quiver of a curse undermine his lip: he
tries to make a better world even while it crumbles in
on him and us (a brutality): when I give my body to another
(or take another’s) I sometimes fear more
15body being taken than was offered, an overextension
of contract: hearts and flowers, scented sentiment, garden
varieties greet us, how lost we want to be in fictions and
fabrications: a worm cores this world’s doings, look out.
> 1974
Mind Stone
This stricture produces now and then a flash of castles,
bodies of another sort, foreign and opposite, their
shuddering airiness native though in a sense to
their origin: balloons in inexperienced hands worry
5me; I stagger into rushes of loss when they nod upward
loose: having had trouble staying on the ground, I’ve talked
pieces of it into not coming off: if I dwell surprisingly
on ashes, shadings away into death, it’s to keep
the colors down, anchoring glass-white mountings to the
10blue bottoms of storms, at least, going out to watch the
canopies of rain held down like dust by the unlimited
particles of descent: oh, yes, it hasn’t been easy—blue
bright-open days overly radiant, severe scythes burning me
off the topsoil: reconciling opposites, one grab in turf, say,
15the other in space, promotes perilously extravagant shows.
1970
Downing Lines
This morning it was
as if the spruce
stood in a sea
the wind rocked
5it so (the wind-sea
sounded like a
sea-wind)
leaning it
way over with
10lengthy insistencies, too;
the ground wobbled, roots rising
and waving—even, I
thought, even trees
stand the test
15of standing,
lone trees’ risk
unbroken by other trees,
grove trees, though,
skinned with rattling
20and rubbing—
even the spruce finds
the middle way
between taking on and
keeping up, the
25wind’s abrasions, scourings
making a show of
difference with solid ground.
1979 (1984)
Whitewater
They say the time of the individual’s past: oh,
well: again: you become more quirky and put
a word in that touches on irrelevance—flimsy:
rapids warn you way off they’re coming up: you hear
5them down or up the canyon: you pull ashore
and trek to see what
shipbottom’s in for or what portage will entail:
squalls, too, give notice, sometimes
short, at sea, a surge loosening through dead air:
10the guy ahead, picking off the earliest edges of
indication, has an advance on knowing but endures
longer the windup of the onsweep: it may be better
to waken in tangling’s final concision and resolution,
death or surprise your summary welcome and dismissive
15look: but if portage is to do it must do thought out.
1969 (1992)
Erminois
The weatherman says “if
the rain continues the roads
will be icy tonight”:
of course, but what if it
5doesn’t: or,
“if the spoken language lay
down and turned up its toes,
the written language
would have its balls”: well,
10sure: or, “if word order
_________
meant nothing in this language . . .”
but it does:
there is forward being
in being, a resource
15unsurroundable, a living
giving forth, so
treasurable one dwells there
in the tiny place saying,
yes, barely, to
20the life that is and is to be.
1975
Construing Deconstruction
The showboat, the main sway of the motion,
rounds the downbend in a toot-white scream-plume,
and there are all the fluffy couples out
strolling the floating parquets and palisades,
5parasols aflutter as flamingoes’ pink airs,
and spit-smart bells peal and bang with agreed
on significances, and here’s the dockside
welcoming committee dressed up to endorse mutual
expectations: meanwhile, those rope-servant or
10misaligned few who can’t or won’t know polish &
candy-striped jackets & crystalline sweet-sips
watch the oilslick spin through kitchen slicks,
behold the silver flicks of mudchurned fry, the
gouging out of plankton habitats by the sternwheel’s
15stalling back washes, dumped garbage grinding under.
1983 (1985)
Elite Street
The devil in me is, I think, among the divines:
defining myself out of the camp of the blessed,
I’ve paraded right in, becoming knowledgeable
about the robes, slippers, the clever absence of heat,
5the rosy tinges of near concern on lips and cheeks,
the halo sizes, numbers, and, probably, colors, too,
and astonished by the airy sprinkling of habitation,
a camp only being in the right could defend: I’m a
natural for training in the doings of indolence,
10idle idolatry, and for jiving the best rap around:
these divines, so changed, so turned out, I suspect,
must have been, my style, demons first, who else
could have figured things out so precisely, to set up:
I have the energy for this kind of aspiration,
15and this is the club I’ve long been meaning to join.
Good Morning, This Morning
Death is very common but not,
I hear, 100% effective; one,
once, unjustly, I suppose, hung
up, downed, rose, a rising
5that delivered death to plenitudes
in scatterings, swingings, stakes
of grubbed up flesh (set afire),
limbs, heads cut off, etc.: is
_________
this a small price to pay for
10something to believe in: nature
is just here, a lovely if careless
spread, and its dynamics, seen
to and smoothed out, can be
suggestive: otherwise, the fridge’s
15clean but for what we ourselves
devise: belief, at any cost,
serves life: let life do without.
1994
Walking Song
A little shower
and, the
sun come out,
ditch-bottom
5brilliance
blinds you:
the highest, doubling
deep,
companions with
10the lowest and the
lowest
spins up to
heights you
can’t
15bear to witness.
(1988)
Sentiment
All things that live die but even
rivers dry up or roll
out of their beds and rising lands
sometimes remove seas and ranges
5snow tops all year wear down eventually:
the earth, of course, itself came
into being and must in time be cindered:
think of the shock, though, meanwhile,
of the minor changes, a friend in an
10accident, being late to your son’s
soccer match, a leaning tree in a
yard an old house has moved away from.
1993 (1994)
Anxiety’s Prosody
Anxiety clears meat chunks out of the stew, carrots, takes
the skimmer to floats of greasy globules and with cheesecloth
filters the broth, looking for the transp
arent, the colorless
essential, the unbeginning and unending of consommé: the
5open anxiety breezes through thick conceits, surface congestions
(it likes metaphors deep-lying, out of sight, their airs misting
up into, lighting up consciousness, unidentifiable presences),
it distills consonance and assonance, glottal thickets, brush
clusters, it thins the rhythms, rushing into longish gaits, more
10distance in less material time: it hates clots, its stump-fires
level fields: patience and calm define borders and boundaries,
hedgerows, and sharp whirls: anxiety burns instrumentation
_________
matterless, assimilates music into motion, sketches the high
suasive turnings, skirts mild natures’ tangled, nubby clumps.
1986 (1988)
The Land of the Knobble-Jobble Tree
A shaded branch will through etiolation stretch, even though it has
little sun to stretch with, to get into the sun, and a sunny branch