by A. R. Ammons
Man, say Hiawathum’s Dad, forget
15about that nature poetry:
this here’s the urban age
(1965)
All Set
I’m so bottled
up,
wind is wine, water
lethal alcohol:
5blood’s dustblack
powder: light
any nerve-end
(1968)
Confessional Poem
Let me be honest with you:
in spite of everything I have
a (oh my) penis: and
you know what: girls don’t:
5girls don’t have one:
and (horrors) boys put theirs
in girls and girls
like to have them: (also,
boys, boys—and, somehow, girls,
10girls)
if I can’t get a girl—I
hardly ever can—I
sometimes think hard &
squiggle my own: girls (hee hee)
15even squiggle theirs
and (shudder) I also crap &
leak: you know: how awful:
oh love my admissions & I’ll
honestly try to substitute loving
20my honesty for loathing myself.
1968 (1968)
For Andrew Wyeth
Outside the window the leaf in a hedge breeze
spins at the end of an invisible web, a lure
to the present from the nothingness it came from
and goes to: separated, its brilliant ruin
5come to life, it spins in a motion separation
in the long under-turns of wind allows to things
the wind has taken to show its presence by:
in the knowledge of our death already
in some way dead, we know, as leaves do not,
10though to spin in an indifference common to ours,
the contemplation of our spinning keeps us, though
separated, here, shocked awake, sharp with ruin:
but obliterations sustain: we exact from winter light
endless differentiations in a foot of wood’s floor
15but can’t approach the light’s source: time from
deeps that may be whole (and still) swirls out,
emerges into hill or house, thrusts upward the held
cool definition of a face, time that makes and
changes: the void at the heart and at the heart
20of all gives perfect way to our tightest dance but
has no space to afford the vanished dance: time,
light, space—fathers and tenders of mushrooms,
rootbark, fabulously-couched windseed—suffer, or
suffer not at all, the obliteration of their infinite
25care: the terror time gives us beginnings: the
void lets us move: blinding light gives us sight:
separated into the knowledge of our death we make
a life that keeps, a time that going holds, a motion
that moving stays: emerging onto the long doomed slope
30of the hill, we force our sight to deny the broad
motions of nothingness into grass, the vacant wall
into scratch and grain: but giving way neither
to easy dream nor helpless ruin we make versions of
the real, so that if separate in our knowledge we may know.
1968 (1968)
Dinah
Some are too difficult to win.
I work to remove her doubt.
By the time I’ve figured me in,
She’s already figured me out.
1968 (1969)
Chinaberry
Out in the edge of the yard at evening
under the reaching chinaberry tree
in the belled, gray country silence
mother and father
5sitting in the cool on the washbench,
the black iron washpot
three-legged and belly burnt
the other side of the path circling the yard,
under the outer arms of the chinaberry umbrella,
10the wooden wide bench, soapslick dry,
galvanized tubs upside down,
cold to touch in the summer dusk,
contained, exact in inner dreams—
we stand in our diagonal of height,
15Mona singing her clear, gospel-singing, happy soprano,
devotional gems, songs of deliverance, glory
trains and royal telephones,
Vida, her thin-faced pale alto self-taught
coming like whippoorwills weary with sleep, next
20in height, and I, shortest,
too young to more than keep the tune,
singing together, together to the sandhill fields,
to whatever moves in with night over the pines,
coming from where in the west the far great
25cherry on the ditchbank stands, standing out black
against the farther, lower pines,
together to the tired, song-starved mother,
My Friend is the King,
to the father of three, three gray faces under
30the darkening tree, three here, three in graves,
together to the sleeping coops and quiet barns
Oh where is my wandering boy tonight?
On the top of Mt. Zion is a City
three singing in the deep-lying Carolina country
35far from town
“prettiest thing I ever heard”
eyes lost in the green blood of night’s tears
of old inherited sorrows, grainy & wasted as the land,
beautiful, wasted as the years in
40the mother’s face, in the father’s hands.
(1969)
Diner
The baked potato’s
hot slit’s
a forward nookie:
I put butter in:
5it flelts and mows:
I stick my fork in:
the white meat quivers some:
I soak my tongue in there,
eat the
10quarterpound reality.
1968 (1970)
Address
Saying blanket obligations
on the
flowery periphery of the coronal
roar
5(and intimately touched by,
bound in
to the black-eyeing blind
radiance)
I have trouble
10forming the figure of my
address—man to man, man to it,
for man through it—
I would speak to the
highest figure in order to speak
15for and to man and
to it
and so exclude not a
dimension from the adequate saying:
what I speak to has not been born
20or has not died,
is deaf and wholly hearing,
keeps me not at all, as
water keeps the buoy:
keeps me
25still
by the spangling linearity
of its motions:
to complete me, lets me fail:
here is the sun:
30here the tall redemption:
here is the flower:
here is the blue spruce.
1970 (1973)
Untelling
Poetry is the word that has no other words,
the telling indistinguishable from the told:
it is all body (spirit) until it moves
and moving only is its declaring, divisible
_________
5neither into mind nor feeling, mind-felt,
form only if motion stays an instant into form,
otherwise, form-motion, the body and the void
interpenetrating, an assuming, a perfect allowance:
how it moves away, returns, settles or
10flashes by, how it works its worked space
/> into memory’s body may tell tellings,
narratives, progressions beyond,
surrounding an instant’s telling, though
only body-in-motion places them there:
15being is its afterlife whose life was becoming:
mind and other words confront, untell its dream.
1970 (1973)
Between
Bubblers and peepers in the frail green woods!
goldfinches from a dozen sources in the thickening
trunk-lifted heights: the day-early version of the night
peepers, not yet come: it’s spring: hot by the
5fence where the thousand-legger dug up from dandelion
roots panics in the sun: but cool, nearly too cool
in the open if lakewind sheets up over the lawn’s
swell: it is nearly impossible to imagine horror,
prostate cancer wards, the grim senseless bleeding,
10the girl caught pale by fruition lust put out of mind:
much that brings tears is needful: splendor has that
shade: from hell the word man spits a heavenly word.
1969 (1973)
Mid-Morning
Square notch like
a booth or
berth
where the dove
5sat on the limb through
last night’s
heaping snow:
I can look around
the grove
10and
count the doves,
gone now.
1973 (1973)
Necessity
Brought in before the stone,
put to my knees,
made to contemplate the grain,
I cried, no,
5let my mind go with roses,
let it trellis the high unreal arcs:
leave my blood to
wells and stars:
do not, I said, take away the world
10or separate my time from time:
the rock drew me in:
I yielded my illusions up
and from the hallowed stone pit
took ash
15and smeared myself away.
(1974)
Scientific Breakdown
But for an observed phenomenon,
a stellar irregularity,
Aristotle might still have
celestial reality
5in tow: (the great principle is
sometimes thrown
by a negligible fact, and grand
thoughts have been found
in humble places):
10earth, water, air, fire
concentrically arranged
vertically toward
the pure and rarified—the base
rationally low, the
15rare high:
outside and surrounding, the Prime
Mover: the universe focused
on man, man’s spectacle,
where he could read harmony
20and self-esteem: had
it not been
for an irregularity (imperfect deity?)
(irregularity allows possibility)
some non-conforming clod
25could not blind himself to, we might
not have to face today
those fuzzy dots
_________
on photographic plates—galaxies,
of which any inch of sky
30yields blinking billions:
harmony, you are too
oversimplified: things
have to get too big
before you show: let’s have Old Scratch
35wriggling into the Garden
to an irregular Tree:
perfect knowledge is beyond reach
and our houses of harmony
tumble into jumbles,
40dissonant as a music school: but even
irregularity has its harmony:
take the Sacred Three
Ways to Handle Irregularity: the bowels
yield to (1) irritation
45(2) lubrication and (3)
flushing: so there are Three
Kinds of Laxative: (1) chemically
irritates the bowels
so that to remove the irritant
50the bowels push all out, a purely
physical transportation
(2) mineral oil, prune juice, bananas
and similar agents
make lodged crusty billets
55hard to keep (3) citrates, being saline,
take water (osmosis) into
the bowels, thus dehydrating
_________
the body, so that irregularity is put
in soak and finally
60flushed out, it’s simple:
this harmony of irregularity, though,
is schematic: cannot universally apply:
(too much irregularity
becomes regular irregularity which is
65defeating): but harmony
I’m glad we have you,
giving us coverage of most probable events:
how nice it would be,
in a way, to yield to you fully
70and have Aristotle and his Prime Mover
back: (a word of caution: if
your irregularity is diarrhea,
choose a demulcifent: literally, dry the
situation up: but not too dry
75(wisdom wisdom): you might have
to switch to oil): knowledge makes pretty
pictures: thanks, Aristotle, for harmony:
you, God, for chinks and irregularities.
(1974)
Convergences Downward
Sometimes the bleakness nears
near-perfect: snow
swarming down the sky, winds
rocking high, roaring and chilling,
5the car an island marooned in the driveway,
tooth aching, cheek swelling,
the forecast
more hard cold:
every handle to or
10on the world seems loose
or broken and then evening
falls with nothing but night.
(1974)
Self
Will you, considering the life I have borne,
the nights twisting cold strings of panic,
other nights (and whole days) the heart racing
and stalling with terror, fury, and desire,
5will you, I said, at this point in a life I’ve
cursed and thought to throw away, a life
I have hushed in darkness as my own error
and devising, will you now in a last chastening,
a humbling like humiliation, require me to come
10up to the hills of openness and announce my
life yours, as given by you and to be given back
to you by me, my gratitude at last for what is
not my own spoken forth, said into the place that
hears and cares to hear nothing because it is
15sound’s own source: my god, my redemption: here
is the dark breakage I have held, not knowing you
made it dumb for speech, not knowing its mix and
constitution just: take this final pride away.
(1974)
Attending
Powwows huddles
a surrounding emptiness
a circling into
common center
5no circumferential gap
for the
running out of
contemplation,
for interruptions
10coming in
the vacant center like
the finest slickest slip
where the imagined
shareable content can shapen
15where differences
without let can unwind
become
if they catch onto
similar differences
20the new ideal
informed terrain<
br />
aggregates clusters clumps
copses thickets
brambles
25powwow in teepee
muddle in huddle
(mandala little tricky
okay if hollow
in center)
30create spell there
grab victory out of there
dream dreams there
peace risen
like teepee center
35go in
have dinner
smoke pipe
stretch out
yell at papooses
40get along fine
1973 (1975)
Interim
We have these
plastic garbage
cans the dome
lids underlatch
5but won’t stay
on so a week’s
rain will come
to two or three
inches sometimes
10rounding out
the bottom wobbles
some and a night’s
freeze will
put a hard
15wheel, a round
pane on the water
you can wiggle
out whole and look
through or roll
20down the bank
all the way to
the creek before
it cracks
1975 (1975)
David
The verbal