by A. R. Ammons
twigs nearly miss to catch
mist and drops
_________
can’t get big enough to
10dangle from some limbs.
Safe
I’ve hidden my desire over the wall under
a pile of stones the morning glory
never breaks out of (no white thread looking
that far through turned and darkened country)
5and nothing ever comes in to:
so, possessed as the wind, I shake around a wider
country now, my paper-panther kite eyes
burning the leaves off trees with seeing and
rattling, brilliant, storming roots up into weeds:
10stone held, I’m safe at last in vision.
1965
Reading Ta’o Chien
Often I go out year-early
to the caterpillars’ tents
hardly aweb enough in the branches
to notice,
5and plunge a stick into
the core-squirm and,
twisting it, dip out a knapsack
bolus and chucking stick and
worms over the hedge say
10well, little scribblers,
let’s see you rewrite that:
this year, though, I’m—why I
_________
don’t know—so different, I pass
the cherry already an upright
15lake cloudy with sail
and say to the late caterpillars
though they hardly listen
(at least, they don’t reply)
what nice sentences!
20the leaves sprout, the caterpillars
as tender as they, and both
purplish green: following the ravage,
for backup there’ll be some new branches,
a second growth of leaves.
1979
Geezerly
I stoop to slip a long
twig under the earthworm
drowning white in
the blacktop rainpool
5so as to tote it
safe to the lawn’s edge:
the worm loosens,
slack as the breathless
water but, nudged,
10firms and lengthens
slender, needling for
soil: I can’t
get down close enough
to work the twig under:
15I’m too rickety to squat; too
_________
brittle to stretch out
alongside: and
it’s way too far to fall.
An Improvisation for Soot and Suet
The pebble
fidgeted by freshets,
mouthed by
trout,
5buried under bank shoals,
cleared risen by a falling tree’s roots,
repossessed crinkled lacy by moss . . .
takes on the rondure
of attack from anywhere,
10its history its loss,
surface events declared
by vanishing,
history what’s
left to tell what left
(1991)
An Improvisation for the Killers of Meat
The fat will let you weaken
before it will give in,
dissolve off into circulation
(resolution outmelts fat)
5the liver comes between
to cushion,
absorb quick feed or
lingeringly to release held goods:
the guts dwell slowly
10on a big feed
holding it back for the membranes
to nibbling polish away
or rush a small order through to
appease the responsive liver:
15the fat resides
behind layers of
negotiation: you can’t
flake it off, its
purpose to hold out and hold on,
20bridging broad privations:
fat: first it is a sheet, then
a blanket, then pillow and bed
of pillows in which the empty stomach blinks
Reckless Endangerment
Black, red, gold, green-speckled leaves
mingle spotty on the same maple:
neighbors not seen all summer show
through the hedge: what
5are they doing—raking leaves,
gliding sheets down billowless,
hefting airy armloads off to winded heaps:
what they’re doing looks brighter
than the sweaty drudgery over here:
10tools,
faces cleared this way
to view, though, someone could speak right
_________
through the hedge, yard to yard,
and crack the summer’s privacy wide open.
1984
Swimming Night
A train rumbles through the valley before day
and I think it at first a deep constancy storm wind
is rising and falling from but then the
whistle toots human signs and I try to pick out
5roars, the wind’s from the train’s, but they
interchange or gusts tear up with a blanking
loudness I can feel the cedars tugging and whipping in.
Then trucktrailers whine like mosquitoes on the turnpike,
their brakes squealing at the light up by the airport.
1984
Ontology Precedes Teleology
Appearances, undwellings, are shunted
aside, the come-and-gone debris
of the lasting, but, think of it, out
of the curvatures of time’s plumbings, to
5appear, be someone, in a where, a bit
planet in a furrow of a flimsy
galaxy, to show up
or show others up, endure being
shown up—just the flash
10on the edge of time that cuts
_________
things loose: to be present in the very
moment of emergence of what
is, spring moths or budsprouts or
peripheral novae or slur forms
15ambling deep reaches: like that:
whereas we could love the lasting only
if it kept the present, which it
doesn’t, but turns in and out of itself
until it turns free of weight
20and shadow and becomes no more than
the turning in and out of its turning,
motion lost at last to a high undoing.
1985 (1989)
Disclaimer
A downpour, thunder-sudden and quit, rattled
then hummed the roof last night, but the woods,
so dry, soaked it up, the brook this
morning still a shimmer in silence: you can have
5poetry in our time if there’s no poetry in it, a
voice if it speaks without a voice: you can
have the world if you will have none of it and
honor if you can’t see honor:
you can have wisdom if one
10among the
clowns and looters, gigglers and angry castaways
will speak: flashy water travels
_________
white over stone, the hard soft-worn,
but give up brook glitter and
15the high world that shines immortal betides.
1993
Spike-Tooth Harrows
We might, rather than lament nothingness,
make nothing of more things, ailments,
blunting the pain also of the differences
farthest from nothing, the tribulations,
5shakedowns of self, forced competitions,
stagefrights we undergo without support
or wondering what the support
is, pills or terrestrial or
celestial friends: I long for a high
10friend u
nfailing, for I have not met here
one who will not forsake—
whereas the celestial friend,
also, needn’t be bedded down over the
weekend or awakened in a funk, or
15lent money to, or encouraged himself,
but is constant, constant as nothingness
which we should not so much lament
as take to its wide ease,
a welcoming unsurroundable in expanse,
20a quality of constancy beyond misfire; and
especially if there’s nothing in us to betray,
no false structures, frail
arrogances to prop up, nothingness may
be, one to one, the very grail we quest.
(1992)
Picking Where Out of When
Waiting’s sometimes the most important element
in winning: for example,
suppose you decided to haul away
the pines’ pollen cones:
5you could get tuckered plucking, sifting,
break your knee slipping off risk-lengthened
ladders, stifle yourself with riled powder:
relax a couple of weeks, the cones clear off:
they may to an early thunderstorm even gold-fringe
10puddles with dense flotillas and, afterwards,
dry into rings’ finest meshings: so many things
left to themselves take care of themselves:
I know a man, though, who picked out his gravesite
and stone, priced the laying away, affixed
15the stark period to his days, then
leaned back into every sine curve, swerve, coordinated
loop and swing of the grammar and loft of his sentence:
some things, a few, left to themselves,
needlessly prolong puzzling blurs.
1979
Odysseus for Eva Maria Rodtwitt
Tying one to
one to
make one
and one to one
5to make
another
_________
and tying the
one to
the other
10to make one,
soon
the design or
weave takes
the view
15and takes
precedence till
the sharp flint
bit
untyable remains
20that slits the
loops loose
so one can
tie one to one
to make one.
1974
High Desiring
Though not the savior wished,
oblivion saves:
rememberers disperse, and
the grave, neutral as a moon,
5rides in no difference
image or word can make:
_________
united, indeed, at last—grave,
earth, father, child—there is
no further use, no scalded
10eye, but the sweet of no
sweet at all, the perpetual song
words and music troubled a while.
(1987)
The Damned
This fellow grazed his woolly goats
on a high ledge, a very high place
snowless in summer, but it was,
perhaps because of the fellow’s loneliness,
5a region in which the mountains talked,
it seemed, and over a miles-wide gulf,
summits forever white rose useless
in august assumptions the polish of
the wind and glare of the sun sanctified,
10the fellow supposed, and he thought,
well, few know that kind of thing,
a rare condition, though not good for grass:
and the fellow, noting that the peaks
had really said nothing yet, went to
15the ledge-edge and looked down on the
summits of sweet-green hills
and runoff rills so lowly and supposed,
again, that these damned came of being
_________
near the sanctified, wherever one finds
20one one finds the other, and he wondered
if the heights knew, somehow, that the energy
of their complacency came of
a differentiation imposed on the backs,
so to speak, of the lowly, and he
25wondered if the sanctified would not
wish to remove themselves, somehow, if
they knew that, but then, he supposed,
knowing that would spoil the sanctification
anyhow, so maybe the peaks could shine
30there, since it seemed they had to, as
wastelands of what it means to be way high:
but the mountains had said nothing and
the fellow supposed himself a supposition,
too, no one having agreed with him, the peaks
35too taken aback, except for this longing
for the valleys luxuriant in his depths.
(1988)
What Was That Again
If out in
the desert
we
trim the
5billies will
the kidless
nannies die back
and absence
thin out
_________
10starvation,
and will
grass take hold
round ungrazed
dunes
15and rise
closing off the
dunes like eyelids,
and will
brushwoods sprinkle
20and flow into
the goatless hollows
streams can
arrive
shining in?
(1988)
Prisons There and Not
A feeling of transparency like freedom
accompanies choosing for oneself
what society chooses one to
choose: the ambience clears of brierworks,
5and entanglements and the shades lofty
boughs catch from one another
become intangible with breeze: the DNA
puts its full intricacy behind one’s doing
its calling, a boost uphill feeling
10downhill: cleared spaces bigger
_________
than fields open up around one and roads
run with one river-wide away
any way one turns: it’s really
nice: fail to get off on the right
15foot and have to turn aside for a cure
for having had to turn aside, though, one
causes, inadvertently, of course, delay
(ditches of delay running frittering systems
along those free ways) and misses dinner, picks
20up a bug at the doctor’s, finds, shortly,
one’s desires nibbling away at accepted
practices: one wants to get free of
hindrances so one can get on with it, but
society isn’t interested in hindrances, as
25such: mixture, encouraging obscurity
of view, befalls, and one must devote
one’s energy to re-addressing the clarifications
missed out on long ago: seeking to make way
through spent darkness, one construes a light
30alternative to the light and begins to prefer its
small allowance as an opening, at least, or
something more like room than one had found before:
one’s free choice then leads to a freedom not free,
but to a freedom free only following victory
_________
35over the freedom one originally fell out
with, meaning war: minority wars are hard
on individuals who even when they make right
minority choices live with their fe
llows
shadowed by a reality they’re the exception
40to: out of step, singled out, working as if as
usual in unusual frames, one cuts back
on preparation, aspiration, the dream of every
possibility: the branches of all this loss
heap up around one as a stricture: okay,
45there is no help for this: one chooses to act
freely, openly: now and then one may
derive an instant’s illusion of the freedom
missed, and tears may hollow out one’s hollow cell.
1985 (1993)
Moving Figures
Actuality surges,
swerves
into edges of
definition
5or, vagrant, softens
and
parts or
stands
_________
weightily awaiting
10somewhere to