by A. R. Ammons
545my father said, my father said, ‘If you get pregnant, I’ll
kill you’ ”: and this morning as I was pricking along the
sidewalk, I heard this lady on the second floor porch say,
I’ll be glad when I’m a senior citizen, the senior
citizens cash in on so many advantages, I can’t wait till
550I’m a senior citizen: said she: now, that, I thought, is
the way to do it: I was pricking along to the library to
look up trash in the unabridged: I got it all down,
every bit of it, including the white: even the bottom
leaves on tobacco, cropped first, sandlugs, when cured
555brown and papery: I bought my first bicycle when I was
15, I think, by being given the first pickings of the trash:
I’m not just trash or white trash or country trash, I’m
tobacco country trash, high-principled Scotch-Irish,
poor white, redneck, riffraff trash: I know all about
560it: and a lot about the other trash around: I take a
trashy view of things: but, then, baby, I love what
I know, and I know trash, there’s so much of it, democratic,
everything turns into it, and so few people want
it, there’s a surplus of it, pick up free: now, when Stevens
565got on to the prospect of a coat-of-arms or royal lineage
back there in Dutchland, he plowed a little money into
discovery: my money’s in the bank and here and
there, and, right now, thank you, I don’t need any: the
only royalty I’m ever going to be interested in is royalties:
570more and more, there’re going to be so many I’ll
sway back and dig imperialism: from where I started the
route was up or forget it, and I’ve come most of the way:
people have heard of me never heard of Amenhotep, who swayed:
I’m a born aristocrat, as anybody will tell you: it’s
575unfortunate there were no funds to carry me off: I
recognized the poet, the trashiest breed, right away as
my most perfect and friendly apprehension: so I have
become if not king of the cats, prince of the hogs & snakes:
it tightens my nose and makes me feel possum-hungry just
580to think of it: I’m going to sway my trash around until
every elegance wilts: nobody has established a more
cordial relationship with the heights than I have, a fact
_________
which has already caused the elegance to shrink even before
it’s going to have a chance to wilt: but my sway will, as
585time goes on, become the new elegance, bumpy and roughshod:
take the old geezers and other rest-home spindly drifts of
flesh: now, that’s trash: or how about all
the mentally retarded or disturbed children or old folks:
lesbians and queers of all varieties: migrant workers,
590not getting anywhere: strung-out guitar pickers at
hopeless junction so and so: aging hookers and johns who
helped with the tide: retired persons: little old
ladies floated up in Florida, no husband, no home,
no children who want them, and not enough to eat:
595we should call this The Republic of Barrels of Trash: we could
now be entering the bicentennial year of The United States of
Barreling Trash: “pretty soon the people on welfare gone
be richer than working people”: The United States of
Shining Garbage from Sea to Greasy Sea: the litter
600glitter: all that remains of free enterprise is if
you fail you deserve it: the land of the hopeless case:
the land of the biggest lobby: we know what is right:
when are we going to make it right: every legislature
knows but what’s right is so plain it’s embarrassing:
605the corporation, the military, the agency: the power
blocs: all have exceeded the guidance and correction
of the people: can here and there an honest man stand
up and not lose his job: can here and there a
decision-maker decide what he knows he should: not
_________
610very likely: it’s okay if some have more if others
have enough: well, get out money for the trash to meet
my pure country trash platitudes: I have not given the
matter under study much study: I’m going to study up on it:
surely, lean, firm energies and rightnesses are found unanticipated
615in free competition: but then you need to be sure the
competition is not rigged: surely people who find
and make things deserve to be rewarded: but the lean,
firm energies throw some people aside: we need to keep
the energies but we need to correct them from abuse,
620the particular cases of mischance, sharpfallen destitution,
of suffering and disaffiliation: we need to sustain the
fallen and extend opportunity to the fallen who can
rise: it is not a great country that grinds along on
the spills and breakage of the weak: it may be strong
625but it is not noble: this is a noble nation: it must
be great and noble: it must do what is right to do:
it must hold back the chomping greedy, nourish the needy:
my trouble as a propagandist is that I want everybody to
be right (and, of course, happy): but is that, like,
630nobody right or happy: ah, these spheral men: they
stand there looking all ways till their feet rot off:
what we need is for someone to choose one thing instead
of another: and choose something that will carry at
least a 60/40 ratio of good: when in again pops the spheral
635man in a wheelchair saying, well, then, get it on
up to 90/10 or 100/0: and there you are: if we could
_________
make a kebab of principle and skewer our chunks of
expedient deals with rightness running through,
the republic might shine otherwise and we could
640call it The Land of Rightness Shining Through the Roasted
Morsels: everybody knows it’s the awkwardest
thing each one standing around the fire with a raw piece
of meat in his hand, shoving and snitching and
forming Cartels of Power to the Flames, or Clearing
645Little Guys out of the Way to the Fire: a few
principles could lend so much structure to deals there’d
be a lot less haggling over shady adjustments of the
moral or morsel self: but who will rise and announce
the structure of the elevations: who will accept the
650skewer of backbone in his own hanging meat: if the
government becomes unworthy of the people, it’s a fine
opportunity for someone as worthy as the people to get
up and say, the people are worthy, and I am worthy:
the machine probably wouldn’t re-elect him but what a
655button of fresh air, could get to be habit forming: I
went over to the Atlantic this morning and said, simply,
long may you wave: the Atlantic didn’t say anything
but it waved: put yourself in certain places, it will
be thought of you automatically that you don’t amount
660to anything or you wouldn’t be there: au contraire,
get, by hook or crook, in to other places you will
automatically be thought something: there is, then,
obviously a genius to a place, a place spirit; for
_________
665aura of a coffeehouse: likewise the executive suite
at General Motors does not compare with the Lower East
Side: the genius runs people away or attracts them as
their own genius finds corresponding influences: feeling
“out of place” is unnerving for anybody: practically:
670this is a high floral season: pussyfoot clover has
shot up and died: common plaintain is mid-cone in
thready bloom: slight hawkweed is putting yellow
buttons a foot off the ground: woolly mullein is
breaking out halfway up into a flowering inferno:
675for the gross showy, there is purple vetch stringing
up fields, chicory looking windy, butterflyweed too
early for butterflies, wild yellow daisies, and other
sanguine displays: it was today (7-8-75) a page ago:
today was Having Lunch with the Fucking Photography Committee
680Day: pecan pie was a dollar a wedge: bavarian creme
pie, only 80¢: (that only’s going to have a different
tone when bcp is $1.60): the mt goes, how’s it
going today: I go, it’s going fine: the mt goes,
we going to get anything going today: I go, how’s
685it going with you: going fine, the mt goes: I go,
what do you say we get going: the mt goes, come:
one way to write is not for permanent improvement but
just to give the reader a place to be while he’s there:
he might want to come back later and be there again:
690even stuff written for long, arduous, out-of-time
_________
contemplation and permanent improvement can hope for
nothing better than that: make an interesting place,
people will visit: there’s just not that much call
these days for polished doldrums (that’s doldrums with
695a sea to shiny sea): people are interested in
trash: that’s where pretension goes to take a spill:
gulls, old model cars (or new smashy ones), sugar
maples coming up bubbly through hoods, where hoods were:
real rank weeds in the cooled, shoved-over sections:
700cartons with good directions, This Side Up, Keep Dry,
Handle with Care: translatable into tender
philosophy: a good read: a place you can come as you
are to: after a while, unrelieved relaxation makes
you nervous: how I hate these summer vacations of
705concentrated domesticity when you go straight from
having too much to do to having nothing to do, blanks
of time tumbling through you in which you can tumble
the time through you or climb walls: or write dumb
poems (like this one) so full of crazy ironies warping
710around inside themselves and folding over themselves
it’s a wonder they don’t give birth to snakes:
what is it I want to do for my country: I mean, as a
poet: that is, if I could get anybody to read the
stuff: as if reading about something would make it come
715true: that is, if I could come up with something worth
coming true: Dean Martin has more effect on this
country in a minute than I have in a lifetime: still,
_________
I want to do something, however cheap and narrow, for
my country or four or five people who know me: but
720if I did something for four or five people, I would
want it to be in line with a larger good: I guess I
should forget the grandiose, and all distant approaches
to it, and just say how I feel: well, I feel lousy:
I feel lousy, though, mainly because I can’t get through
725to do anything good for my country: it matters how
your relations with your wife are holding up, how great a
father you are, whether you’re making progress with
the oedipal situation or learning how to mosey with
your peers: but the local effect does not suffice:
730profound emotions of allegiance and patriotism (the most
profoundly selfless emotion, probably) are with us,
if not now much in the wear: I want to relate locally,
but I want the local also to rise to join other locals
till you get something like a union: I want a top that
735shines and turns influence back on me: I’m tired
of the hollow in myself that only damage comes to wound
again: I’m tired of feeling that here on North Street
I have no neighbor in Mississippi or Wyoming or in the
lower Shenandoah Valley or along the winding byways of
740the Blue Ridge (how beautiful, it lies like a long
float on the land, misty with heat or humidity or
pollution): I don’t want to be by myself: I don’t
want anybody else to be by himself much: I don’t mind being
alone; it’s loneliness that gets me: I’d do anything I
_________
745could if anybody else would do anything he could: back
to the trash, back to this, this home away from home:
it’s hard for a child to learn that adults are flawed,
even corrupt: this young country hasn’t learned that
corruption is the way: when it learns that,
750maybe it can accept it or change it: the people look
sad on the porches: the children play but seem puzzled:
the old ladies don’t trust the street: the young men
and women, uncalled for, are unemployed: braggadocio:
you may be the type of person who can’t understand
755why anybody would want to write poetry, let alone
read it: that’s where the reading mainly is, let
alone: most people would rather be a fountain than
a basin, for some reason: but as for writing, why,
it’s like walking, you aren’t working but you aren’t
760doing nothing: but walking this morning, I heard the
painter say to the kid, “You aren’t allowed on the
ladder, period”: allowed on the ladder: I took
yesterday off: why not work a day and rest a week:
I don’t know if I had worked a week, but I rested a
765day: I called it Knocking the Fucking Bitching
Off a Day Day: as a transcendental affirmationalist
I undergo throes complaining: I do better thinking
there must be some reason to go on living: bitching
can get you in the worst frame of mind: you think,
770what can I find to bitch about today: and you can
find something: that’s the leanest reassurance:
_________
is a tree a concrete thing: right: I mean, maybe:
that is, it’s a specific location and disposition:
not abstract: all right, all right: (who’s talking):
775it’s also a microclimate: but in so many ways: it
absorbs radiation, it shades the ground, it moistens
the environment, it slows the wind: but then the
corner concrete (not abstract) is also a microclimate:
it bakes in the hot sun, an egg-frier: then there’s
780the black macadam and the white streak, minority white,
a climate in a climate: then there are the windy
corners (fairly abstract), puddles, marigolds: all
contribute microclimates to the high summation when
the fellow on the radio says, it’s eighty-five degrees:
785everything about works that way, from the dense local
to the synopsis:
a waste is a terrible thing to mind:
we’re getting a gospel singing group, The Rock of
Ages: what a very different effect would be The Ages
of Rock: this is 7-10: started back a way with
790“you may be the type”: I’m the typist: when the
going gets tough, the tough get going: I go warm up
the coffee: (it has worked its way up from the wind
through the waters, the leaves of bushes and branches,
tangles and brambles, risen to summits and made
795space, rounded out the vision to the lay of land
and lands and now it looks into the human eye: what
is it: it is the viability, the coherence, that has
assumed disposition: nearly mute, having been mute a
_________
while, it wants to have a program but fears the layout
800of justice to each detail will deprive amelioration of
direction and force, that what is is so because it has
worked itself out through necessity: wisdom will not
fool with the just and fear assails the disruptive
song introduced to turn the balanced unbalanced right):
805aggravated: can’t handle the pile-up of phobias: can’t
deal with tunnels, bridges, gaps: can’t get around much
anymore: if you have a humidity problem, move to the