by A. R. Ammons
Anger Tangle
The world (that
approves his
art) would (if it
knew him)
5condemn his self,
a contempt he
answers with anger
which (since
it is futile)
10turns to lassitude,
indifference,
dejection but
_________
a contempt
(strait-laced, fat-faced)
15he finds
contemptible until
he, generous,
understands the world’s
contempt to absolve
20his own,
which understanding
though takes
implication into his
self, self-despising,
25to which he
reacts with anger or
indifference
and loss of self.
1972
The Deep Slow
The pheasant’s skinny
feet skid
on ice freezing
rain polished
5the snow with last night
and around the round
birdfeeder’s tin roof
a carousel of icicles drops
part way
10nearly shutting the birds out:
heaviness heavier
than leaves glazes
bush and branch,
the hemlocks withered
_________
15old men come up from lakebottom:
if the clouds weren’t
easing along oozing occasional
bright edges,
this could be
20the condition
the world had settled on.
1974 (1976)
Saying Saying Away
The point of a poem is to become wordless, to find
the rounding out that assimilates reductiveness and
assertion to an unspeakable whole: the end of the poem
is to reconstruct silence, a cure of words, to subvert
5the fragmentary, discursive, partial, definitional
into stance and feeling: when the stance of a poem becomes
whole and still, its motions are like travels of light
and surface through the aspects of a piece of sculpture:
no act of analysis sees the whole at once: the poem
10reconciles, ends, and holds its motions: its images
lose their sharp edges and colors into the tones and
moods of landscape, into the inexhaustible suggestiveness
of impressionism: the end of a poem is to lose itself
in itself, to give over the partialities of rhythm,
15image, and sense to coherences words can give no access
to and have no access to, a place where the distinction
between meaning and being is erased into the meaning of
being: what a poem says may be its least and most
misleading ploy: how it holds its behavior opens the poem
20up to indefinableness and inexhaustibility, ontology
and teleology become one, to the focused point where in
mulling over and meditating on the poem we can sort
out its behavior and ours and define for ourselves what
we like and don’t and return our definitions to criticism
25and instruction, idling, and waking nonchalance.
(1996)
Line Drawings
The pear leaf blister mite should be
compelled to stay off pear leaves
(how can the leaves fill out to produce
the branch weight of fruit coming—the
5fruit already set up by snow-chunks of
blossoms blown—and how can
the blistered leaves do the solar-panel
work, taking up the collections, that
changes light wooden: you know
10how soon pear wood mellows and falls
off the trees) I wonder if the pear leaf
blister mite might not be suitable for
peach leaves where the wood’s harder
or, no, should they be moved
15to the big patches of that bamboo-like
import, the smooth, heart-shaped leaves,
detestable tall weeds you can’t get
rid of because of runners underground
that shoot shoots up everywhere:
20why can’t the pear leaf blister mites
prefer something despicable and
eradicate it and leave the pears alone
that are shaped just like women, the
narrow-shouldered stem end and the round
_________
25ampling of the other: why must we
put up with this equation where anything
good for anything is
answered by a tantamount negative: how
the pear leaf blister mites would react
30to these quarrels and postulations, who
knows, but what are we here for, to figure
out every little thing or to clear
a place off for whatever we have to say?
1984
Prey
The old man in a shimmy, his arms
blotched bruises, inches barefoot
down the hall, his head ticking
in the deep stoop:
5the orderly, slowed behind,
too many tasks ahead, swoops
the old man up in his arms,
and the little old man flies,
astonished as a stricken bird:
10at the radial desk, centralizing
the wings, the nurses look on
the bright side not to see too much.
(1996)
Very High Condition
The long ridge
line (winter’s
sunrise-sunset
scale) of
5stone and sky holds
hill sweeps, passes—
indifferent to our
settlement here:
I look at it and
10mean nothing: yet
near the center
central indifference,
neither pardon nor
indictment,
15runs: I need forgiveness
for wrongs inadvertent
and not, known to
me and not:
but there’s the ridge
20line, recourse, an
assumption beyond
rescue and fall, a
purity we can
note, only note.
The Category of Last Resort
for Louise and Tom Gossett
The least criticism, at least the least
insistent (though in a way a
very big affair) signals untold (if
it’s really there) from the well center
5of indifference, nature’s best preserved,
most essential bailiwick: how
sweet it is to move out, how easing,
from the strictures, penalties, binds
of choice and difference to the
_________
10bluet-sprinkled meadow’s
hedged-in, willy-nilly brook and on up
along the rise to the high woods,
the unfolding and falling away into distance!
not so much because the brook’s
15careless whether one wades or
leaps it, or strolls by disregarding its
trinkling glass, and not because the day is
so clear one can hardly see it—the day!—
if only one could pick something, something
20distilled from the branch-high air of
a tulip poplar just leafing, and gulp
it down, desire’s patent, purest possibility
and sweetest prize, so as to secure
oneself against the unraveling
25of a mislived or unlived life, the whole
caught complete in a take: but
I hope there’s an alternative, an
indifference indifferent to its own indifference,
a center the reading of all our
30differences into would not stain or
sway, a place any difference could come to to
weigh itself in, a judge (perhaps
missing from her seat) whose attention yelling
logic could not attract: there, though,
35listening for his sentence,
one could play
_________
every fact of difference and desire into action
and, hearing nothing, find in nothing
the nearest satisfaction to being everything.
1975
The Clenched-Jaw School
The holdout of brook-glitter in a drought,
the skittery edginess of leaves against a windy hedge row—
I sit out of the way by the brookfalls
looking in places too drab for pilgrimage
5for revelations such
as the sun’s surviving the all-day splintering
of running water, the
water broken, too, over and over into falls: stones hear
or say my verses:
10brookbanks set out
staves of music for me:
I put the bars in, I take them out, I move them around.
(1996)
Ceppagna
The heights, fastnesses, are sharp and
wild: olive trees scatter into the open,
die out, and, beyond,
higher, dandelions sweeten
5thin air: sheep go up where spring
grass winters into hay: there the
black bear runs and knows
a way old as rocks: the wolf, crisp
_________
with practices, whirls, and the moon
10burns his eyes: when the shepherd,
his third week, runs out of food, he is,
except for greens, out—homeless,
wineless, lampless, wifeless:
his eyes feed lean on
15the liquor of stars, and just gravity
gets him back to earthly hungers.
(1988)
Pit Lines
The grave, though, though it ends
so much recollection, ends less
than a life, whole stages, as of theaters,
having been blocked out by scenery or,
5earlier, locked away, fields that got
no further than design or that, opened
to the light once, folded, possibilities
having slimmed untoward way before the end:
in fact, sometimes, abundance or no
10abundance (not white paint for a mountain
cone), the flimsiest remnant, a scrap
of bridal veil or a pocketwatch fob,
makes it to the grave, surrender
after surrender having mowed down the fields
15and worn out the stagehands: laughter,
preventing, brings tears: graves are
gleaned and filled: but the wind does
not enter in: it deserts the body and
the grave and stays gone: the hills aren’t
20indifferent, they are too neutral for this.
1979 (1988)
Silvering Shadow
The frail-green woods bubble and peep, goldfinches
thickening the branch-splayed heights,
an early day version of the night peepers,
not here yet: spring is here: warmer by the paling
5fence where the thousand-legger, dug up with the dandelion
root, panics in the light: but nearly too cool
in the open when lakewind sheets up over the lawn’s
swell: with so much burgeoning to gather force,
the bulgings and oozings of cancer wards, the girl
10stricken responsible after generous sex, estrange:
splendor has the scariest shade:
in hell, the word-one picks out a heavenly word.
1969
Abscission
The flow-finding of the making impulse
rounds the curves of what-is
and shakes out scaffolding
suitable to the outline of the perception
5and so on and under the severest skepticism
takes in colors, flavors,
the characters of whole things (of whatever scale,
a circle of curve assuming the magnitude)
as belonging to universes of their own
10proprieties—and so the making
gathers into the disintegrating and integrating
motions of its dispositional axis
_________
until, having fulfilled its time, having searched
out its completion, it scores the fissure that
15cracks it off while it can be saved,
and it becomes different and timeless.
1985 (1988)
Microinscriptions
The fall of deep-bottom arctic water down
the Atlantic midrib, a glacial inch a
month, the high assimilations of the free-wandering
jet stream, these places we look to for durance
5or dwelling motion—sometimes, ephemeral, we need
them so much (or the floating apart of continents,
a centimeter a year, into the lank voyages) we
forget the many shimmering little absolute
disappearances, goings-away like local problems
10solved (a drowned nest floated free) whereas the big
problems dwell in unsolvability’s sway, useful
as systems of lasting definition, too big to be
let go of, currencies: everything is saved in the
disappearances and returns except what we like, the
15particular melt of light in a particular
eye, that is the construct whose fire is so nearly
inexpressible we think the thinnest, highest
meanders of ozone not so crushing: what, completely
away, however much is left where so much—lakes,
20clouds—flows without loss, oh, well, though lakes
and clouds can’t keep either: and, of course, the
_________
axis has shifted more than once and Arctic migrated
down and around, and the jet stream, before oxygen,
bore a different bole: all’s lost—there is an
25ultimate mere celestial glow not much having to
do with our business, though the energy base of
any business: still, and specially since we stay
so many blinks, the caresses of hands and lips
having to do at times with young ones or at some time
30trying to share final pain—there we hold on.
1981 (1984)
Readings by Ways
The epicurean (and stoic) philosophers,
monists and
dualists,
are interesting (they show
5that time over time
unwinds nearly the same story) but
how can I resist the creek,
slowing over depth
or breaking into shiny ramshackles
10on a rise of pebbles or blurring
storm history in weed-slants
along high banks: I get
caught up in clouds illustrating
the sky or muddying out: I can’t
15get enough of the nodding
_________
adjustment when a
squirrel leaps on or off a branch,
the trail quaking: still, I
like it when the old philosopher says
20live unknown, whole
histories like unread creeks.
1975 (1988)
Abandon
The crows during
warm fall spells
work their way up
/>
whatever direction
5the wind will be coming from
the next windy day
so they can bound downslope
cawing long surprises, dipping at
one another, folding their
10wings and like splendid
trash skimming the woods:
when it’s gold and red
and windy and they fall out
of the north, the exhilaration
15appears
never to have been earned and they
seem to take the fall for
the only kind, the only one.
1976
Local Antiquities
The brook, older
than manuscripts, tells
the news:
the hills, out in the
5rain,
antedate altars:
when the painter turns
from “absolute”
paint, it begins to
10crack: weeds and
bushes
where cities stood
put the rubble
down: we
15separate
our things from
things, but only
changing with change
stays beyond things
20and us, mocks change’s
mocking changes.
1973 (1996)