The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2
Page 29
will, having resources, put on length: for these two reasons, bushes
tend to get bigger: trees that do this, too, are not more scientific
5than other trees, just bigger: although, since all trees and bushes
react this way, I suppose they’re all bigger together, a uniformity of
effect and a limitation of means so egalitarian as to be totalitarian,
a political reading: bushes willing to be small are rare: more often
than not, small bushes have not found a way to get bigger: there’s
10burning drought to hold back for or a winter that lashes everything even
with ice or there are dunes it’s more important for roots to grow down
into than branches up from: things small are unwillingly small, unless
like animalcules of water droplets they’re too small to dream in or toward
a more noticeable dimension: things small when stirred take the vertical
15too quickly, standing not fifteen degrees leant off true, whereas weightier
members level a kind of solemn directness at you, a bigger thrill, though,
than the trivial alert: some branches, shaded or sunny, don’t grow measurably
however often they stiffen into and out of reach: some sizable and
very considerable things widen and lengthen in a single plane, broaden
20like a leaf, open and close, furl and foment in organizations by groove
or lamina, outright astonishments: some like a small bush, some scanty:
some short-cropped, some moss-like long: some like a curled, I suppose,
bush: or wavy: some care only for the secrets thick bushes keep away
or open to: some cut down all their bushes to a lush-lawn prickleness
_________
25and manifest everything they have openly: a thing is not insignificant
just because you say it is insignificant, nor empty just because you say
it is empty, and a thing is not meaningless just because you say so,
nor absurd: you must make a thing whatever it is and having made it so
it must always be what it is and not the thing it isn’t that you didn’t
30make: this positive procedural edge, though, cuts both ways: a pile of
meanings is meaningless, whereas an emptiness of meanings has not been
created empty, and if you try to create it empty you will get something
in it: existence is an unavoidable fact, and there is nothing else—
“nothing”—except existence: there is much surdity but no ab, none, not
35a hairpiece: there are, for example, different colored bushes and many can
be dyed: a world of bedeckings and fragrances, kinky, ribbony, floral.
1985 (1993)
Capabilities
Can nature form a rule ruling nature
out, a line differential to the point
materiality loses its fuzzy-fine edges
describing it: not the knots, balances,
5compensations, quandaries, divisions,
paradoxes, not those big centralities
that leave a little somewhere to go
when going uses itself up, but (everything
settled, believe me) tiny errors of
10curvature, shades of misfitting, leftover
hues the colors didn’t take—there
attention flares up like a rabbit
_________
shot: can we go on being entertained
by the large matters (not we
15oldies): the wild, the exceptional
break new waves through: nature
may draw the line of our own and its own
vanishing: still, we’re here where
such states of being (love?) occur now
20and then we can’t put our minds on nature’s
own doings, and we dwell in reveries of
adequate spirit nature may not know how
to float, surpass, or continue in:
remarkable sucked fizzy drinks burning the mucous.
1978
Minutial Impress
Nothing will ever be the same again, he said,
not even the same will be the same again,
the same itself acquiring through time
the promotion of shift-small differences:
5still, is will be is, we know, close
to it, close to forever: and anything
worked off or away into perfection
will be subtracted from the coming round
of the next coming round: so, not too
10much perfection, and even that the kind
near perfection, what can fall back and
help stir the confusion and élan: but
even though is will be is (a form of the
highest patience and knowing) even the
15biggest is, returning, plays out through
history extraordinary ragged changes:
should we wish not to get it straight, since
to do so is to vanish into nothing,
nothing vanished perhaps except vanishing itself:
20a little here & there into is: the rest churns.
1979
Showups
Never to be the fool, I always play the fool, but
ready ever to be an even greater fool, sometimes
fail the role and make never sometimes, indeed,
alas: the sobriety of headhung
5humiliation when the heart offers itself up
to sacrifice, the goddess clicking away on
cobblestones from some gray dead end, the wall flat,
a stoppage, blank as the wailing spaces of lost
mind: then I, fool’s fool, the true show folded,
10test technique again beyond willing, easy
failure to see with what colorations imagination
twists the other side of waste; the fool’s
fool dies and the play re-opens, grief-wrenched
hair fabulous and startled, pants over-heisted,
15face jacked up a millimeter or so above true.
1971
Modes Against Too Much
My poems, if poems
other than casual
entrances into systems, are
_________
lulls by which
5motion going by too
fast as in damaging winds
slows to assume
(forced into the definition of)
mediating rhythms,
10sketchy but entangling
knots, in this
wind tight patterns
obstructive and unyielding
likely to come down
15or be hauled off whole,
criss-cross trellises
in typhoon, say:
but bits, strings,
swerving (lessening and
20swelling) elongations
that giving to
the wind like high water or
sails catch a part
of it formed into known
25ways, let go, withstood.
(1993)
Sky Rides
My constructions aim so far
or high away, they get me
‘out of myself’ as they must for
my sight to build a site:
_________
5but out of myself, I rise into
alignment with others’ far
projections and there we all are,
stripped of earthly material,
the knots we build from, but
10safely together, as luminous
as we would have been, born
into a luminous place: but,
it’s the way it goes, we fall
back at times, singled out again,
15into the dense knowledge of
the word or two we can’t,
shouldn’t, or won’t say that said
could get us about okay on
the ground.
1993
Heights Known
Love surgent, equipped with the direction
of sail, is matchless, the heading right on in
through the weather, ups and downs, the high
swipes and weltering, but afterwards there is
5the not-so-spanking hull flat in doldrums
oblivious as absence, and there is the possibility
of tides elsewhere, of coves and offshore
anchorages, island-scented breezes: and in love
the planks steam and split or a small fire
10finds its way up a hatch or timbers peel and
time-consuming decisions have to be made:
love’s bells loll and clang these storms and calms
averaging out into a kind of indifference one
luckily doesn’t assume in the first place and go by.
1979
Conservationist
Little time left to work with,
the old say, is like youth’s having
worked with little: birth’s center
spent’s soon the sinkhole’s
5oozing intake: who though (if not
the old and long-accustomed) will
care for the old: not the old and
long-accustomed, imminent deliverance
from new and old their watchwords:
10the child, coming into so much
time to fill, shape, name,
the child’s the keeper, traditionalist.
A Little Thing Like That
life comes under no other
propositions than mountain decrees,
it seems at times;
seldom if a meander is allowed
5can one see it far: it bends
away with its willows
behind a boulder-head or sheer face-off:
winding is the way of life
_________
I would choose, would you, if
10I could choose, for I would
like always to be on the other side
of wherever there’s trouble
or pointing responsibility
or too much nailing down: just the
15flexibility of brooks, dribbling over
stones or swelling up to dribble
over stones: I have always felt,
as one should, I think, shy
of mountains: they don’t seem like
20breasts to me—
but they rise
up august into air-starving presences
and they command views: I like
to swerve away from commands
25because I’m unconvinced that I could
do all the things I might
be commanded to do or that I would
want to do them, and I would rather
feint a dissolve into a curvature,
30a curvature of disappearance, as
around a hill or down from a rise:
may I not feel the speech of mountains
when they “speak” and may I wander
with meanders, not seeing far (ahead
_________
35or behind) and picking up willows
wherever possible, or alders and
stopping to have lunch in the shade
and drink from boulder-drained melts.
1986 (1986)
Getting About
The windiest morning this
year (the second month) bringing
the first warm
heave of rain from the south:
5starlings, this ocean’s
winter schools, knot
close, thickening twig-mesh
in broad oaks and hold
fast, clasped to the boiling sways:
10flare-winged crows
flap, tossed backwards, dip into penetrating
spills to check the wind:
a hawk, though, tilting,
splits wings-in directly ahead into the
15blundering wall, loosening its
stones like silt.
(1988)
December Starlings
A sheer loops in and berries bead
the oak’s sticky lofts: twittering
blooms a dense stippling, a burn
_________
that eases off with settling, but
5just then before dusk’s blurs,
a loaded twig snaps and the whole
sheet ripples in report;
the black sheer unfurls and swirls
away to fold into night elsewhere.
1984 (1995)
Strings
for Don Randel
The yellow house
of the willow is
threadbare, now,
the shiny little shingles
5missing,
thick as thatch
under the snow floor the
wind’s laid in:
inside and outside
10glare nearly the same
cold and light:
what is that
black rill
taking away—bits of
15summer dark, bark
shadow, scrimps
of fern shade from
den holes;
_________
it’s draining banks
20and mounds white,
churning
narrows and dropping
away
quickly down
25shale-shelves:
the crisp of my steps
in dry snow is
the “shine” of
stone underground:
30I’m so happy!
the house nearly
gone, so is
the grief,
and yet
35a wind-frail house
is here.
(1988)
Winding Up
The sun’s risings and
settings on the west
ridge like
an accordion swell
5and shrink the year’s
music, a music rolling
too quick now to step to—
we rocking on the waves,
_________
the frequency working up
10shaking the underload:
soon the hum-burr will start,
grind us free of the ground,
loop loose from the tip
of the sharpest sine peak,
15a point, catapult
to the long way away.
1979
Middling Seasons
The weather here hits so many extremes the
transitions sweep moderation: this morning
ninety mile an hour gusts strip live
wood from the maple crowns and on the ground
5bend whatever bends over over, root-eruptions,
scatterings, whole
activations of leaves, bark, twigs,
plastic foam, sheet—scurryings, unwindings
blustered up: this winter stalled to
10the deepest chill ever: last winter was the
coldest span: the year before, the most snow:
then the highest temperature, and the highest
ever sustained, in a blocked inversion
two weeks long: high water: drought: scientists
15blame sunspots: others say, in spite
of the centenary figures, it was never any different:
a few ask how much quietude we wished: well, I
_________
need a skinny place in there not a statistical moderation,
really moderate, a sunny calm clime in which to hang
20onto some wrong idea about the nature of things.
1979 (1992)
Looking Way Off
The winter day after days
of lows and flurries
and one trench of snow
cleared brilliantly and I
5went to the window to see
the sun, striking through
everything from blue
spruce
to black rose-branch
to the tops of gold burdock,
10touch down on the ridge,
the clarity, the line,
the dazzling dalliance and
surprising myself said,
“Make me right,” but tightened
15airless till, till I imagined
from on high an unassenting
reply, “You’re right wrong.”
so I cleave to my holding.
Obsession
The wordwhirl stood
high in my head
so many
_________
years dustdevil-like
5it dominated
the ridges and
ranges of whatever else
was there, so
that now,
10the whirl worn
low, wobbled
diminished
out of sight behind
a stone, I
15think what has
become of the way
things were, the
ridges empty, too.
1984 (1989)