by A. R. Ammons
but they’re scary
if you’re chary
toward the poor
or you’re a doer
15of evil: mostly
it’s too costly
to have morals
if nothing’s to eat:
so animals tweet
20or slide silent:
they have no bent
to make souls repent:
and that’s why
if you ask I
25most creatures
aren’t preachers.
Old Sweet
Love can make a sucker of you: it can
lick you before you know it: overblown,
you can crack open and release a
dependent, solely yours: a misstep or
5assent can journey remembering:
flanked by rising rivals, you can admire
the cocksure too much, those quick
on the trigger: what does it mean to
marry a selfish person with incompatible
10views: lust can lead you out along
the ground like a gutted worm: you better
look out for love: it’s really interesting.
(1998)
Coffee Shoppe
Short, heavy-set
guy (rebuilding going
on around the corner)
comes in for a muffin,
_________
5his crotch noticeable,
most of the tall
run out of him into dick.
[“Early Woods,” first collected in Highgate Road, also appears here in Fucking Right, between “Coffee Shoppe” and “Getting It on Straight.” The text of the poem is identical to that in Highgate Road.]
Getting It on Straight
I said to
myself when I
was a boy,
Archie, I said,
5nobody’s
going to
care about you,
freckle face,
not for
10yourself alone
(or your
red hair)
you better
learn to do
15something
people can get
interested in:
I was right,
_________
nobody’s proved
20interested in
me yet for myself alone
but I was wrong
one way or the
other
25about the other:
nobody cares
what I do, either.
1975
Weeding
If you don’t go the way
you want to go you
don’t know which way to go:
the one way becomes one of
5indifferent thousands, the
roads all limber with unwillingness.
Bong
Genghis Kong
did some wrong,
killing Bills
just for thrills,
5killing Johns
for bonbons,
also girls
for pretty pearls,
and Lords for lands
10and high commands,
so much spunk
only a skunk
could love him:
great deeds stem
15from unsavory men,
notable when
many die
to raise them high:
but might is right,
20and it’s just trite
not to think so:
lines high and low
are redrawn, rules
reversed, when fools
25beget slaughters
instead of daughters
and sons: sweet loot
tells the troot.
Bad Goods
All my
life I’ve
been saving
myself for
5something: I
wdn’t go
here, do that:
hello, death,
I’ve brought
10you everything.
Foreshortening
A circumcision is
No prick nick.
(1998)
Outdoor Plumbing
My father said
this fellow got
up on a cold
morning and his
5thing was so
shriveled up he
got a hold of
his belly
button and
10pissed his pants.
1994
BOSH AND FLAPDOODLE (2005)
Fasting
Not two months off till the shortest day, the
shadows near noon all flop over one way as if
it were soon to be dusk: that’s winter coming
all right, slanted over, long-casting, &
5pale: the trees are suddenly bristled
stripped: did the sun steam a frost up and melt
the leaves: probably not: squirrels shook
the leaves out of the lofts: some (people)
are strict, spare, and pure; some strew gems
10in the mud: I perforce raise the level of the
mud till it endows shining, like lake
ice or sunny water or like a distant field of
pumpkins, leafless and unpicked, or even like
the first rye fields against gray woods, so
15bright green: hark, the jewels are lost in
the general rising, and the rare and priceless
are cheapened by white towers in a still-blue
day: of course, you can’t wear an image, a
windchurned figure from a volcano core, on
20your finger, and some thoughts are too grand
to diadem a brain: (the tree by the road now
looks like a sketch for a tree): Halloween
_________
needs what we have today—a stir: not a gale
so constant and high but gusts that show up
25out of nowhere, presences that are not there,
little twirls of leaves that scoot across the
street and then just wilt out, forms,
air-whorls that are made out of nothing
but that touch your face or rustle into the
30bushes, whispering and hissing: all kinds of
cases where motion charges the show
and where motion gives its form away by
picking up miscellany and throwing it off, motion
the closest cousin to spirit and spirit the
35closest neighbor to the other world, haunted
with possibility, hope, anguish, and alarm.
Reverse Reserve and You Have Reverse
This morning, with small swirls of the season’s
first snowflakes dropping and rising in the
air, a bushy black dog, his head high, his
tongue aloll, his tail also high, comes down
5the street: lost, he looks wildly all around,
turns into and out of driveways, reverses
his run and goes back to places as unfamiliar
as if he had never come through them: my wife
has lost her taste for eggs: she would rather
10have a piece of toast with raspberry jam and
_________
a little (real) butter than over, scrambled,
poached or boiled hard: I ask her, where has
the taste gone, but it’s just like losing yr
dog, she doesn’t know where it is: eggs in
15popovers are still found in her taste: she
just loves popovers, with jam, I mean, and
a little (real) butter: cultural conditioning
has changed us so we have to look at the apes,
the gorillas, chimps, and babs to see what a
20little cultural conditioning does: if we
didn’t have cultural conditioning, we males
would (as we sometimes still do) soften up the
females with attention or pursuit to bend them to
the primary imperative: for baboons, you
25know, females, wouldn’t want an infant swinging
from their belly or arms or riding on their
backs if it wasn’t for estrus compelling them:
we already know that women prefer romance and
cuddling to anything invasive: whereas, we
30males desire above all to get it in and get
rid of it: sometimes women will snarl, fake
headaches, pretend to be asleep because who
wants to risk her life having babies and lose
her life taking care of them, you might say:
35so males have to hold them up a little into
mindless obedience so the sperm can run: of
_________
course, we are so cultivated now that the
woman can stand right in the kitchen and
refuse to get on the table: where does that
40leave the urgent one with his outstanding
example of firmness in hand: it is, then,
without doubt the sharpness of male need that
perpetuates the species (which, truly, might
better be left alone):
45RULLY OUTSTANDING
Surface Effects
Nature, you know, is not a one-way street: its
most consistent figure is turning—turning
back, turning in, turning around: why?, because
it has nowhere to go but into itself: all its
5motions are intermediate: if carrion turns
into flight (as it becomes in the wings of
buzzards) why it is not long before flight is
carrion again: of course, if nature is a
one-way street it is some kind of superlative
10avenue, some large summary that takes its
account from time—that is, if time is a
one-way street: that is, if time, too, doesn’t
bend back into itself and start its intermediaries
over again: if, for example, dry years cause
_________
15the brook to cut its way one-sided, maybe that
deepens at least that narrow flow so fish can
get up the ledges to the pools and sleepy
shallows: or the worn-out ledge grist may
make a place downstream to put a willow in: so
20nature, turning, does not turn on itself, for
whatever it turns into is nature anew: Mars,
desolate on the surface, doesn’t mind desolation:
Venus’s boiling stones are just a lit merriment:
the hillside, drenched by rain after wild
25fires, doesn’t mind collapsing: what is wrong
for us is wrong for us; we may even
be wrong in reckoning it wrong; it may be
right, and we haven’t yet learned how: when
we correct wrongs, we may interfere with
30the swing-around that will bring things right,
possibly righter than they were before:
don’t worry about nature: it is always nature:
when we divert water into California’s valley
deserts, we produce mucho melons, but we
35leave the salty mouth of the Colorado dry: we
play our arrogances small scale: slowly we
learn that surplus carbon monoxide feeds a soil
microorganism: the large designs are filigrees
through which nearly still measures move, turn, split,
40come and go again.
(1997)
Aubade
They say, lose weight, change your lifestyle:
that’s, take the life out of your style and
the style out of your life: give up fats,
give up sweets, chew rabbit greens, raw: and
5how about carrots: raw: also, wear your
hipbones out walking: we were designed for
times when breakfast was not always there, and
you had to walk a mile, maybe, for your first
berry or you had to chip off a flint before
10you could dig up a root: and there were
times when like going off to a weight reduction
center you had a belly full of nothing: easy
to be skinny digesting bark: but here now at
the breakfast buffet or lavish brunch you’re
15trapped between resistance and getting your
money’s worth and the net gain from that
transaction is about one pound more: hunting
and gathering is a better lifestyle than
resisting: resisting works up your nerves
20not your appetite (already substantial in the
wild) and burns up fewer calories than the
activity arising from hunger pangs: all in
all this is a praise for modern life—who
wants to pick the subrealities from his teeth
_________
25every minute—but all this is just not what
we were designed for, bad as it was: any way
I go now I feel I’m going against nature, when
I feel so free with the ways and means, the
dynamics, the essentialities honed out clearly
30from millions of years: sometimes when I say
“you” in my poems and appear to be addressing
the lord above, I’m personifying the contours
of the onhigh, the ways by which the world
works, however hard to see: for the onhigh
35is every time the onlow, too, and in the
middle: one lifts up one’s voice to the
lineations of singing and sings, in effect,
you, you are the one, the center, it is around
you that the comings and goings gather, you
40are the before and after, the around and
through: in all your motions you are ever
still, constant as motion itself: there with
you we abide, abide the changes, abide the
dissolutions and recommencements of our very
45selves, abide in your abiding: but, of course
I don’t mean “you” as anyone in particular
but I mean the center of motions millions of
years have taught us to seek: now, with
space travel and gene therapy that “you” has
50moved out of the woods and rocks and streams
_________
and traveled on out so far in space that it
rounds the whole and is, in a way, nowhere to
be found or congratulated, and so what is out
there dwells in our heads now as a bit of
55yearning, maybe vestigial, and it is a yearning
like painful sweetness, a nearly reachable
presence that nearly feels like love, something
we can put aside as we get up to rustle up a
little breakfast or contemplate a little
60weight loss, or gladden the morning by getting
off to work. . . .
Oil Ode
My wife says that the two guys on TV say that
the most important thing is changing the oil:
and my wife says this friend of hers said go
over to Doug’s Fish Fry in Homer, they change
5the oil often: and this fellow I met in a
factory once told a joke in which a guy sticks
up his middle finger to this lady and says,
check your oil? that is not very nice: I
mean, what could he do for her: just say,
10lady, your oil’s fine: because what if it
wasn’t, could he replenish a drought: my
father’s friend once said he needed to “grease