by A. R. Ammons
30you don’t have to ask me what Santa brought me
and I’ll say, well, it’s Easter now, and I’m
not going to ask about those eggs. . . .
Way Down Upon the Woodsy Roads
Don’t you think poetry should be succinct:
not now: I think it should be discinct: it
should wander off and lose its way back and
then bump into a sign and have to walk home:
5who gives a hoot about these big-Mack trucks
of COMPRESSION: what are the most words for
_________
the least: take your cute little compact and
don’t tell me anything about it: just turn me
loose, let me rattle my ole prattle: poetry
10springs greatest from deepest depths: well,
let her whistle: how shallow can anything
get: (rhyming on the front end): I do not
believe that setting words to rhyme and meter
turns prose into poetry, and having written
15some of the shortest poems, I now like to
write around largely into any precinct (not
succinct) or pavilion (a favorite word) I fall
in with: I have done my duty: I am a happy
man: I am at large: life sho is show biz:
20make room for the great presence of nothing:
do you never long to wander off: from the
concentrations: for it is one thing to fail
of them and another never to have intended
them: the love nest, men, becomes a solid
25little (mortgaged) colonial: duty becomes your
chief commendation: the animal in you, older
than your kind, longs to undertake the heavy
freedom of going off by himself into the wide
periphery of chance and surprise, pleasure or
30terror: oh, come with me, or go off like me,
if only in the deep travels of your soul, and
let your howl hold itself in through all the
_________
forests of the night: it’s the shortest day:
the sun is just now setting behind the branch
35of the crabapple tree it always sets behind
this day of the year. . . .
DRAB POT
APPENDIX A:
Poems Published During Ammons’s Lifetime but Uncollected
It Is As Far
It is as far inward as outward:
the inward bursts at last to dying particles;
the outward receding the approach of light
runs out of time,
5the mind fleet and nervous as a rat
along the dark galactic arms.
I have juxtaposed too much
weighing hot eloquence against infinity;
determining the proper
10dimension of dust, whether
atom, earth, or universe; stepping
outside myself to
expose the operation of benignancy.
Shall I be fragmentary and fire-baptized:
15or still and whole like a cycle?
I pray the Word was not a Squeak that circled out
enclosing worlds and greater worlds beyond
fusing with shoreless infinity.
(1956)
11-25-56
The nights dark now
the moon rises with dawn
a shallop on the sea of distant trees
overtaken
5a thing
sacrificed before the golden coming sun
a late unfailing greeter of my tears
Help me to love what
vanishes and rest
10Oh hold me white thing Achilles knew
1956 (1958)
Hymn
Make lean the vowels of my lips
Do not let my words shimmer the placid
waters of your eternity
Leave my skull in the open the
5wind can get to
saying the things the wind says curving round
the cool guidance of a bone
The sounds of the times do not drown
the nearly silenced fears
10Let me relieving hear those fears speak
away from jangled roaring men
Who can be numbed by noise should hallow it
sounding in the violent obliteration of his fear
his lonely helpful decibel they say
15You who cannot write simplify
the vocabulary of my eyes
Let me move into the fringe of silence
where my words may have their slow revolving birth
for a diary to your eyes
20in the throats of silent men
1957 (1959)
Slippery Log Swamp
So came to a cross-water
and felled a cypress
and went over:
that was a hundred years ago:
5the cypress sagging into the water
turned green and
made a name,
Slippery Log Swamp:
downstream a white bridge now
10growls at passing cars,
few cars:
two miles further the superhighway
burns on false, high, nameless ground:
cypress log has eased underwater:
15the name is gone,
the way has been forgotten:
those who spoke the name,
their
dogs running across
20ahead of them,
have shut their mouths
under harder names:
the swamp is still: you can’t
get across: it looks as if
25it hadn’t aged a day
for a hundred years:
the going under of log, name, and memory.
1961 (1962)
Canto 46
you say I have no form:
if you read me so you can prove
I have no form
I will not care
5whether I have any form
or not: I may be
poetizing, a stream
improvising to the sea:
maybe I’m making a moat,
10a round one, or
maybe a square one:
I may be laying out an intricate
network of ditches to
irrigate the drab country of
15your brain: read me
enough to find out
(O people, memorize some lines!) and
I will not care: I do not really care
of course whether you read me
20or not: it’s your
problem: if you read me
though you will have to read me well
or you will not know how to answer your
questions: you say I have
25no form: you may be right:
it is after all
to be questioned whether
one should poetize or make poems; that
is, whether one should take up
30poetry as navigation
_________
or in order to make
ships: philosophers have
the same problem you know,
whether to make systems or
35simply to philosophize:
they can’t decide:
neither can I: it is a
tug-of-war, polar tension: the
chief thing to know about
40polar tension
is that it is
built in and can be
no more resolved than you can
resolve a stone: when I
45come across
such a
thing I
leave
it for
50later
de
vel
op
m
1959 (1962)
Canto 24
from the multiplicities of underbrush
the party,
in unmapped country,
halted: minds
5rushed with relief into pause’s
void:
feet punctured, limb-wept
eyes, legs liver raw, arms filigreed
thrusting the blade to the one stem
10under the profusion of limbs:
clothes ripped:
mosquitoes, greenheads,
the possible, frightened mocassin:
halted, looked around, considered:
15longed for a river
clearing, shore,
slope or prairie, for direction
over-riding
the small wounds, the hunger, the sung
20sleeplessness, the
actual branches; an
enunciation of purpose, affirmation,
a concision, limiting:
“where are we?”
25“keep moving”:
“moving, we
may go deeper”:
“moving is the only
_________
way out”:
30from a wet, shuddering, malarial
face, “leave me”:
a tall longleaf
pine nearby, the leader said, “by pausing to
rise, we
35may seeing ahead
gain time on the underbrush: who
can climb this tree?”
one offered but halfway up the limbless trunk
sank against
40the bark and had to fail:
another gained the limbs but the blue
glaze of dusk falling
closed him in:
next morning,
45another climber, bough high, cried
“smoke!”
“what is it, a woods-fire?”
“a column,
still”:
50“where?”
“north of the morning”:
“a dead tree,
lightning lit”: “a stump remaining,
burning in
55the roots”:
“we can’t see”:
“what do you see?” “two columns,
three!”
“come down,” the leader
60said, “get out your trinkets:
_________
set your minds to
cunning and preparedness: we
will try
the habitation of men—peace or war”:
(1963)
View
From the boardwalk looked down into the sun,
the clear disc mirrored in wet sand, a surrounding
atmosphere blue, sandblur, haze, and still
another atmosphere of loss of light into gray sand:
5curious to see the sun grounded and small, held
in the wide day of its own light, to see a sand-piper
run across and not get burned, the only hiss and
steam that of breakers caving in to sizzle the level
upward reach: wide enough to get lost in myself,
10I feel more fear than pride: too wide, too wide
is loss of center, a peripheral concern
tugging center to a peripheral center, not true:
looked down and saw (seeing and believing) that
though wide and lost, I might hope to stumble on
15an image of myself sharp and whole, all wider being
brought in small: no fear of sun or self.
(1963)
Sung Reassertions
after a poem by William Carlos Williams
The cock announces dominion
to the morning: does
not wake uncertain whether
to claim the field
21or sneak away pheasant-like
through the grass: the sun,
his embassy of light, colors
the throne-room of his breast:
his cry obliterates the stars:
26from farm to farm
the kingdoms are laid out,
each call a challenge
and congratulation,
sung reassertion
31dispelling
the threat of night that clouds blends
obscures
melts into one, shapes lost,
boundaries drifting,
36the dark coop floating through time:
the scream of precise outlines!
of defended orders
commanding the insurrections
of dream and night:
41the cock wakes, crows, treads,
feeds, fights, sleeps: sleeps
fitfully, impatient
of time’s insinuating treachery,
and crows defiantly in the middle
46of the night.
(1963)
Connection
The sumac thicket
on the bay’s bank-edge
emits
_________
under cloud-closed skies
5an
intervaled squeak:
trusting, I
make a bird
and place
10it in there, responsible—
and things
go on as usual.
1963 (1964)
Community
The toeless pigeon in the park
kept balance on the stubs, frequently
used his wings—short flights:
got around: though
5there were certain actions he was excluded from:
couldn’t rise
and hang on the hand rich with grain: lost
all quick maneuvers for the scattered grain:
managed to come in an active second
10but got remnants when surprises of bounty fell:
did you think me whole?
whose heart is broken owns my broken heart.
The man sat on the steps in the cold morning sun
and tried to be interested in the children,
15their games loud with action and joy:
traffic spurned past, brilliant buicks, people
caught up in accelerations of things to be done,
society commanding and needing them: and the
man turned his eyes here and there
20across the gas and tried to light in distant trees,
and there was not any single way that he could fly
nor any net of necessity he could get caught by:
did you think me whole?
whose heart is broken owns my broken heart.
25The angels ascended burdened with the light burdens
of burning souls and song kept breaking out new
in clusters that blended in and the
luminous words seemed all of a consonance
as if nothing could go wrong, harmony
30having delivered everything to grace:
one soul half-dark at the foot of the ladder
reached out to touch a busy angel’s shoulder,
saying, wait, those aren’t the words I know, I don’t
understand that music: wait, O blissful foreigner:
35did you think me whole?
whose heart is broken owns my broken heart.
(1965)
A Birth of Winter
There is a warmth in rot
winter can’t reach into fully
to quench: the stray
that sat a few weeks ago in a sun-warmed nook
5by the door
and then went away—
I thought back home—
went away completely
into death
10behind my evergreens: last week
sent up into sunlight,
after a night below freezing, its
_________
first singing wreath of blue-green
flowers, huge fast flies
15that caught the morning sun
out of frost and used the day as a summer:
I can see I can’t trust winter to put an end to this,
so tomorrow,
fur in high heat riding
the shovel, I’ll take that special piece of
20summer to a grave’s
exact winter—and cut flowers don’t last long.
(1965)
Urban Rage
Hiawathum say,
Hey, Dad,
they’s rainbow grease on the water:
Man, thas motor oil
5say Hiawathum’s Dad
Dad, say Hiawathum, how comes the fish
is lying up belly-white
under the rainbow
Man, say Hiawathum’s Dad,
10because they’s dead
Hiawathum say, Dad, I seen one wasn’t dead:
his mouth was sucking little
circles in the rainbow