by A. R. Ammons
You know how babies in kindergarten catch (or
give) a new cold every week, and how young
people in college, you see their breakfast or
lunch spilled by the walkways, or you see them
5flash down the hall loaded with a bathroom
urgency: it’s because these new people, their
flexibility is so wide they have to take on
the definitions of immunity, and their bowels
have to adjust to the environmental influx:
10gradually, they settle in: you sometimes see
old folks cold-free and nicely trained for yrs
at a time; they and not-they have fought out
a partial standoff allowing lingering peace:
young people are green, tender, responsive &
15so delightful (usually): it takes time for
them to become anything you can count on: I’m
glad I can put, with all this talk, slosh back
into the metrically-induced compressions of
terrorist tightwads who’ve squeezed the
20tradition so lean so long: these neat little
_________
packets of considered richness, excluding the
wasted grandeur of dull prairies and empty
seas, so much ice plunging off Antarctica,
these little tightly packed exclusions, what,
25is’t not nobler and a more a liking of the maker
to sprinkle hedgerows up and down anything,
repeat krill astonishingly, fill up a sky with
rolling rows of discrete white clouds (imagine
what it would cost!), what’s the matter with
30dirt, dirt, and more dirt, and a little bit
more: can one be big and rich: but what about
the poor patch where only perking geysers can
cough up a little green: oh, don’t mess with
me: do I have to tell you everything. . . .
Hooliganism
Once (there was a time when) I was attracted
to, if not attractive to, everybody, starlet
and streetlet, athlete and bellybag: afire,
I burned anything, including myself: kneedeep
5in ashen brush, even some simmering fagots, I
tried to separate the heat from the flame but
gave up, pouring it all into the love of a wife
now nearly half a century old—the wife a
little older: most of those old flames (sweet
10people) have flickered away except for the
_________
corner of my mind where lively they live on in
honor, honorary doctorates circling their
laureled heads—what schools they founded!
taking what pains, with what tears, they taught
15me how, roaring possibilities and tenderest
glows: love, love, one learns to love, it is
not easy, yet not to love, even astray, leaves
something left for the grave: burnt out
completely is ease at last, the trunk honeyed
20full as a fall hive: when the light dies out
at last on the darkening coals, the life
turns to jewels, so expensive, and
they never give the sparkle up: this was
a fancy, and not half fancy enough and somewhat
25lacking in detail but ever true.
(1998)
Slacking Off
You don’t put them in, they can’t stay in:
calories, I mean: you don’t put them in, you
don’t have to get them out: you can sit all
day at the TV, a couch potato, and shrivel up like
5a stale french fry: you won’t have to exercise
a bit, pretty soon a skeleton would look fat
next to you: that’s a skeleton that died of
thick bones from too much exercise: who won’t
_________
get close enough to the edge of definition
10won’t get the edge in “living on the edge”:
why won’t some come to edges others can’t keep
away from: answer me that: okay, I’ll do it:
if your differentiation, so-called, is a
similitude broadly applying why then your
15identity dissolves in happy safety with the
group, crowd, nation, even continent, unless
you’re away, say out of town or away on business
or vacation: then you might find you had
transported your singular distinction into the
20midst of a major otherness: mostly, though,
as you would probably want to get on back home
you would warmly and wholeheartedly identify
with your likenesses or kind: if your
differentiation is poorly peopled, you may
25rub the majority abrasively, and it may be
dangerous for you to show your face or unwind
your genome: better keep your mouth shut,
unless you can represent the growing edge of a
coming time when, it may be, you can move more
30smoothly in and out of the circuits of grace:
but if you come clean as an abomination, better
snitch a helicopter and get the fuck out: the
animals, you know, other than ourselves though
much the same, are like archeological sites:
_________
35we need to plunder their behavior to get at the
roots and devices pertaining to survival on
this planet: the lions, how they interact,
killing, eating, mating, their disputes among
themselves: and the orang-utans, our motives
40written simply, deeply, silently: even the
bacteria, little hordes swimming this way and
that together: a piece of fossil notable in
me says hit it, git it, and git: but, of
course, that looks out of place dragged out in
45front of our cultural conditioning. . . .
Quibbling the Colossal
I just had the funniest thought: it’s the
singing of Wales and whales that I like so
much: you know, have you heard those men’s
groups, those coal miners and church people in
5Wales singing: to be deeply and sweetly undone,
listen in: and the scrawny risings and
screechings and deep bellowings of whales,
their arias personal (?) and predatory at
love and prey—that makes up mind for us as
10we study to make out mind in them: the reason
I can’t attain world view or associational
complexity is that when I read I’m asleep by
_________
the second paragraph: also, my poems come in
dislocated increments, because my spine between
15the shoulderblades gets to hurting when I type:
also, my feet swell from sitting still: but
when the world tilts one way it rights another
which is to say that the disjunctiveness of my
recent verse cracks up the dark cloud and
20covering shield of influence and lets fresh
light in, more than what little was left, a
sliver along the farthest horizon: room to
breathe and stretch and not give a shit, room
to turn my armies of words around in or camp
25out and hide (bivouac): height to reach up
through the smoke and busted mirrors to clear
views of the beginnings high in the oldest
times: but seriously you know, this way of
seeing things is just a way of seeing things:
30time is not crept up on by some accumulative
designer but percolates afresh every day like
a hot cup of coffee: and, Harold, if
this is
an Evening Land, when within memory was it
otherwise, all of civilized time a second in
35the all of time: good lord, we’re all so
recent, we’ve hardly got our ears scrubbed,
hair unmatted, our teeth root-canaled: so,
shine on, shine on, harvest moon: the computers
_________
are clicking, and the greatest dawn ever is
40rosy in the skies.
CAST THE OVERCAST
Informing Dynamics
We don’t live near a stream, but now we do:
the water slipping down the side of the street
would shame many a river with a big name
inscribed on space shots, with a history, with
5fish: three or four inches this morning and
more coming: a flotation medium rising in the
basement, alas, a mop and bucket my squeezing
remedy: and Phyllis is off at a funeral:
put down in this much water, one could drown;
10at least, get wet: but what does the body
care that has no spirit in it: it has already
drowned in a medium sleep pales before: and
the spirit, even: it was just a bit of
electricity firing off joints and nets: off,
15it isn’t there anymore: the body, though, is
but it has taken on the temperature of the
ground and sees no difference in itself: oh,
but the difference to some! a lifetime’s
worth of getting on with life: it is just that
20quick cut between getting our monographs
_________
published about horse fever and keeping the drain
free below the rainspout and putting a little
aside for the kids’ education and—BOP—gone:
I have so much trouble with that edge: the
25day-to-day plunged into eternity: the look
back then from eternity to the day-to-day:
what was it all about, what was the use, how
did we get so interested, so worried, so
anxious: I say, meaning cannot be criticized
30by time: where does time get off: while there
is meaning, there is meaning: meaninglessness
is not the opposite but the absence of
meaning: when anything has served its purpose
it might as well be abandoned, even meaning:
35but meaning is really good while it lasts: too
bad you can’t store it up anywhere for a download.
(1997)
Pyroclastic Flows
I’m on drugs, now: this is the way people on
too much medicinal uplift write: they are
very nearly sorry that they cannot take you
very seriously: they have been rendered
5incapable of their own tragedy: they don’t
understand how anyone can hold a strong opinion
_________
or crave a stiff measure: they are the first
to hold themselves up to the mirror of
inconsequence and smile: they don’t grasp
10that their ribbons are on a flogging stick:
I say to the man, are you my provider: when
I need the feelings, I get down on my knees
and say, wipe out some of the darkness, put the
jiggle back in: how much is that: the druggist
15flips out his counting knife and 5, 10, 15,
there they go, one a day, twice if need be,
only as prescribed: well, it takes a few wks
of flushing and burning to get on them but
then you cool out, you float, you are under
20the wings of butterflies: the air, you know,
is not just nothing: it is a medium like the
sea but thinner: things, as fishes in water
do, float in it—mites, and household plants
called yeasts, sundry viral and bacterial
25organisms: you’ve seen pictures of those big
catfish breathing thick water: well, we have
our own strainers, blockers, and sort of gills:
already here 70 years, I don’t get too shook
up about what floats in the air: as long as
30it’s not me or only my drugs, honey
HARD ASSETTE
Odd Man Out
I’m just an old man in a de-gilded (gelded?) cage: a
bird, too: I think I’m a hornbill: when I
blow hard, I get a horny sound: it whacks
off tree trunks: my friends in the forest
5want to know what’s the fuss about: frankly,
I can’t keep it down: I try to hum a lot
instead and look way out into the periphery:
but as to a lodestone or couple of lodestones
my attention wanders back and seizes exigency
10out of aura: listen, talk about old: mineral
deposits stiffen old men’s bladder walls: at
the latrine, if you can get started, only,
say, the first level, a third, goes, especially
if you’re in a hurry: you cut it off: the
15walls, you know, need to collapse to the
remaining quantity: that takes time: you
could shake away with a bladder hardly spent:
old men have to stand there and soon they can
feel the second level acquire pressure, and
20then when they get down to the last dribble
there’s probably half a pint unencircled: we,
you, they have to work at it: but out in the
forest meanwhile the monkeys burble, the floor
viper slides: give it half an hour, then
RAISE A BEAD
Squall Lines
They say of us old people, look, what do you
care, how much do you have to lose: go ahead,
cruise down the Volga and check out Petersburg
or drive into New York City: if you get
5blipped off, what’s that: it won’t be long
before you blip off anyhow: why, what has a
25-year-old built up in 25 years that compares
with a 70-year-old’s trove: think of the
perspective, the seasoning, the long loves,
10the vigil till enemies die: also, how about
the money, prestige, the real estate: what,
you ask, do the old have to lose, why, more &
more till sitting back in easy splendor they
don’t want to go at all: but the 25-year-old
15will complain that if he flips he loses what
he had yet to gain: still wet behind the ears
he doesn’t even know what that is (not that
anyone does): alas, the old have little in
that bank: the young inherit the world, but
20we already have it, except we’ve had it. . . .
John Henry
This morning I greeted my wife’s waking with
how’s my sweet little dewberry but, poor thing, the
_________
answer was a rotten sore throat, headache,
upset stomach and, soon determined, 100.2
5fever: so I said to her, well, there you are:
sometimes these berries mold or canker on the
vine: an oblong aspirin, coke (potable), half
a slice of toast, and cuddled up in a corner
of the couch with the Ithaca Journal and the
10Wall Street Journal she is locating, I hope,
the road to recovery: but that hacking cough: