by A. R. Ammons
course by: it doesn’t matter if you end or
begin with me but that you have a journey of
your own: I’ll be the mirage the camel’s legs
flicker in: or I’ll be the caw of the crow
3525broken loose at night by wind and thunder:
I’ll be around: I’ll be the bark you flatten
your hand against as you lean a look into the
grand Grand Canyon: be on your way (with me,
with me) and I’ll have my way alone to myself
3530with you: when my journey is done and I am
gone on the other journey, earth’s, not mine,
you will look back at my hollow meanderings and
then know everything: after all, a
trail of nothingness marks its way by cave and
3535cliff, drop and steep, shore willow and fern:
73
no, I carry hods, I’m a sideloader, cement mixer:
I deal in avoirdupois, millstones swing my perfect
neck (low), I lumbersomely sway: I carry
weight: but the tug of the encircling
3540sings me to the storm drain: am I about to
be or am I being moved by the waters: will
the speed climb as the circles shrink: has most
of my world gone on before me: is this it:
_________
is the voice of gravity calling up through
3545the grill or grid or whatever it is: should
I be turning around to cry goodbyes before
I’m too busy whirling: alas, another,
perhaps the original, hole “black as a pit,”
nothing returns from: am I going down the
3550drain: or am I out still, languid in the long
curvings: (is one not born to delight in the
presence thereof of that which is—or is
spring pollen to bother one): is nothing
sacred: all is: I mean, if a rattlesnake
3555whirls out of the brushwork and hangs into you
that is terrifyingly sacred: and when
you have wintered with a dark dead rose, the
springing of the dewy rose is sweetly sacred:
in respect to the sacred, you should get
3560out of the way of a loose log slipping down the
hill, and watch it when chill turns the rain
slick: if a high wind wrinkles the lake the
sharp-lit ruffles are sacred: and when the
lion snarls and bites in the ecstasy, that is
3565the glory thereof: nothing, not a single
thing, is secular: but beyond the fact that
everything is sacred nothing whatever is to be
made of it: we do not know whose machinery it
is if it is anyone’s: is cum nasty: well,
_________
3570yes, but there are fire-threads in it that
stitch together life: and what about the mean
old egg: it comes looking: and it kills
thousands for the one it can’t refuse, that
won’t be refused, the raper of walls and
3575chemical warfare: alas, the lean cry of the
newborn dik the cheetah squeezes, isn’t that
awful: but the cheetah lies down to her
sucklings: the milk that flows is sacred: I
suppose I could go on: it looks as if I could:
3580in my last (and nearly first) review from
England, it is observed that I am on automatic,
good lord, is there so little to consider that
it must be reconsidered: throw the abundance
away: wipe it off, shove it over: we are
3585without limits: except for the little black
bean within us, still in its skin, awaiting
rain: inside that is a darker harder bean:
it is the vitality: it is a hard
bean: it holds the reaching peripheries in
3590check:
74
clamp the c (c-clamp?) of clog on log, it’s a
dog: is, too: be beep: bittle de doo doo
daw: de daw daw: people always if, if, iffing,
if this, if that, my father used to say
_________
3595with a cunning air “if the dog hadn’t
stopped to shit, he’d have cotched the rabbit”
my father when he was being winky-wise liked
to say cotched: (my memory is about as long as
your dick: that’s fairly short, hiccuped Henry)
3600no, since you ask, no, I don’t write to trim
my way into your approval, though I wish your
approval: and for your censure, it wavers on
the ridge of defining my good: though I don’t
care for your censure: still, some things one
3605doesn’t care for are useful, even illuminating
but if I don’t let you mess with me, you could
ask why I mess with you: after all, writing
is one thing: allurements to readers, possibly
misleading the worn-out or broke, carry
3610responsibilities: may you not pay me to do
whatever I please: do you not like to see the
field played, especially played well: (some
writers of traditional verse are better than
others, as are the writers of free verse: it’s
3615not the verse that counts but the difference):
(there really was nothing for me to amount to
except the nothing I am: I mean, by the
smallest amount, sir, by a hair, did I manage
to bring anything off: prospects at my
3620unfolding were as withered as an old folks’
_________
skin collection: as I grew up things were
said of me by the elders from a
state of half amusement: I was not thought
likely, never likable: look you now who
3625stuffs bucks and smiles: I say, we are blind
to what we do will do: I say, responsible for
what we intend, what did we intend: help us
out there: do us a little good: I say to
people twisting in their minds, come on over
3630here to me, honey, I’ve been twisted fo-fi
times: I know the way to go easy on yourselves:
it was a dark road to find but I lit it up:
you are not the big cheese here: you didn’t
set this up: goodness turns out bad, meanness
3635saves: how are you supposed to know, when you
consider that millions of others are intervening
where the thread will frazzle: but then, of
course, as it were, press the c (as in
c-clamp) in clamp up against lamp and you
3640have damp: cool.
75
these cold days in May give me the woolly-willies:
it’s hard to maintain an erection out in the
windchill: the young women cannot see your ardent
carriage increased when the wind outlines
_________
3645them in savory ways: (it takes old guys half
an hour to start pissing and the rest of the
day to finish): southwetserly: why is it that
the truth is not half as believable as the
unlikely: why?, why because the truth runs
3650from indifferent to terrifying (“we die”)
whereas the unlikeliest possibility we have
any evidence of is that (“we don’t”): but it
is just the unlikeliness that introduces the
presence of the marvelous, abrogations and
3655effects only gods could arrange: the unbelievable
(through faith) becomes the most believable
while the dull flood of pure truth, abundant,
overwhelmi
ng, obvious, just washes us away:
what has an old man to do with a purpose: what
3660long field or range of hills has he to play his
purpose through: alas, at the butt end of what
was, he totes up his tedious results and sorts
about in them for a flicker of stone or gleam
of dust, his purpose to reckon up so much
3665trash played out into dribbles and feints: but
sometimes old men limping about as if on
broken bones will have excellent hearing and
the snickers of the young, or just the rude
impatience, will smite and jar them and drive
3670them off ever so castaway to the park benches
_________
of neglect and shame: to the young the finicky
faults of the old are comedies split with
contrast: but the butt end of all your days &
ways is a little arousing, if you get my point:
3675see also, fag end: caught up in the woodsy
wiles, flickers and gleams, of LIFE, Robert,
perceiving he could go either way, went the way
his imagination less frequently went, which
was, for him, the way most people go, so he had
3680a fairly normal life—house, children, wife,
cow, and a side of poems:
76
your insidious eloquence makes me seek the
plain dealing of the woods, the dark, the clear
stars: and your refinement, a line so thinly
3685held I can’t tell which side will break from
snide tittering into howling mockery: (a little
extra humidity over, say, recent days has
turned the streets into rivers, embankments
into rubble, and this morning it all turned
3690into snow—the pink tulip trees luminous
under their clusters of white; the crabapple
blossoms, though, ready to radiate, frozen
out of their sockets, could be, and everywhere
gushy mush cushions the walkways: it is, of
3695course, Mother’s Day, May 11, a good day for
_________
corsages’ metallic glaze and fern lace: my
mother is dead and gone, a death 46 years old,
but a death as close as the next cell of my
brain: when in distress with her young brood,
3700as many dying as living, she cried out “give
me the roses while I live” I had no roses
and the distress taken up into myself, I had
the impoverishment of hysteria, my mouth at
times as I bent over leaking like a fountain,
3705my dreams full of stiff figures that tried to
move: now that I have whatever I want, coin
or flower, I can give nothing back, the
lips cannot find a smile, the hands cannot
ease into the lap, the eyes cannot light with
3710calm): how does the magician, who makes reality
vanish, feel when his infected thumb throbs
and a pink streak or two times its way up his
arm: does the magic vanish like an imp
shrieking with mischievous delight: I say,
3715does the magic of reality take revenge:
well, so it is with the weavers of language
and their cunning cloths that string out of
vestments or take the material out of presences[:]
some day these weavers will be the object of
3720their practices, and the present will present
them with no present of escape: tell true:
_________
speak plain: deal openly: shed deceit:
these yield no room to the coming round of the
other side: TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF TRASH
77
3725truth persists, if at all, hardly distinguishable
from a pack of lies: the truth has about as
much chance as a slender of wheat in weeds:
but, of course, weeds are the truth, too, just
not the truth we want to keep: not that what
3730we don’t want to keep isn’t also often true:
for example, some of us, those below the line,
want to think that all men are equal, since
that would raise us: while to others, if all
men are equal, equality would step them down:
3735well, the truth is that all men are equal, but
you know how it is, you hem and haw, give and
take, squirm and squat, and it all comes out
how you’re as equal or unequal as you can
make it: allowances like woolly ramifications
3740surround these ideal axises (axes?): the
breaking down of things promotes possibility:
as with love, the lucky cannot, except by
scraps and fidgets, hold onto love, while those
who love to the sour bottom of desperation
_________
3745can let nothing, not even themselves, alone to
live but must cleave to the passion till it
kills, either inwardly or outwardly: thank
goodness for the half-assed and easygoing, for
the good stuff from time to time that takes
3750love on and lets it go: thank the lord for
those who get off in the morning to the office
and clear their minds for stratagem and strife:
we should always believe the opposite of what
is believed because what is believed hides
3755by contradicting what we don’t want to believe:
the truth covers the merely true and the truly
believed. . . .
HASTEN ALONG
78
the rot of some deep-wasting roots pops bulbs
3760of white mushrooms up which boil the soil, I
mean, moil the soil (a bile phrase), how, what
a misgo (alack, my best bad writing)—no, no,
my characters aren’t characters but charact’ry[,]
all kinds of things played out poorly:
3765if the temperature, as they say it might, goes
to 25 tonight, the begonias will be gone, the
daffodils will be daffy, and the crabapples
will be, well, crabby, and, of course, the
_________
succulent mother-of-pearl will suck: (sonority
3770cannot draw the height of his arc but blubbers
underwater like a drowning humpback: these
days: and a man, a writer, said of a man,
a literary agent, that he, the literary agent,
said he liked only gaspable stories: graspable
3775I said, you mean: no, he, the writer, said:
he said that he, the literary agent, said he
would seek to place only the gaspable: alas,
that ever the age had come to such: but, on
the other hand, dull, bad writing will not hue
3780up the cry, I whoreson daresay:) there is a
galaxy lies askant the tree-level that spins
its frail arms out to the Hubble lens, and
light traveling at over 180,000 miles per
second can get there in 600,000,000 years: you
3785can put that in your pipe and smoke it, poof
you’re gone: (when you get old you’re more
interested in a redistribution of weight than
wealth: the pot lumps smooth with convexity,
the abs lose their trained ruffles, and the