by A. R. Ammons
good Lord there’s one on page 1569
of the unabridged!
less
95than
noth
rage, despairing of the
agencies to lessen its
flooding oncoming
100becomes
nature poetry,
the shine of boulders,
the frilliness
of sphagnum, smoky
105bogs: rage that must
contain itself
changes into the manyness
of arbovitae tips,
the shimmying fry of
110wayward sand, ranges
cracked wild, buttressed
for hundreds of miles
with ravines
somebody walked on the brook!
115though underneath the muffled
discourse went on thought
not spoken
scripture of scrawls,
feet skiing, stopping,
120turning, climbing the bank:
cursive
a crack enters the sodden macadam
and branches half way across the road
telling with fracture accuracy
125of underground swell, strain, give
death puts a stop to things
folks, I knew I would never
get along with them, thick, obscure,
their knowledge by heart: I knew
130I belonged to the other order of
possibility, impossibility:
I’m not going to have a myth to
see me through, it looks like: my
illusions are lumber bookshelves stack:
135I’m going to face the stripped fact:
terror will come of that for how can I be
equal to seeing in the flushed
colors of snow-pheasants the pheasant
platter-dead under snow.
(1977)
Delineation
I round the bend
downslope to my home
and there
three miles across the valley
5the ridge gap
(where the hills nearly flowed
together once
or tried to flow apart) holds
and my ten or twenty (whatever)
10years left rush
up in a whirlwind and
throw themselves away
(1978)
Transcending
The balloon maker, stalled desire:
the held
swells, inflates, winds rush,
matter bleeds gravity out,
5suspension
sucks emptiness in:
earth renounces such to levitation:
goodbye,
rocking balloon, helium sent, goodbye,
10nodding ascension: saint-high,
unpressured, pop
windy seeds to space.
(1977)
Fire Going
Douglas Worth
had too much
to bring to
appear quickly
5among us:
others arrived
early with a flashy
branch or two:
Mr. Worth is
10working
the hardwood loads.
(1977)
Marble
Never did get down there to Washington:
but course I heard tell of the place:
I met a feller once who’d been there
hisself: said he had: he said the main
5thing about it was that whichever way you
went you got lost, them round squares with
gen’als pointing pistols and swords the wrong
way: feller said what they call a public
servant there’s got servants, terrible
10big cars, and doodads: said you couldn’t
tell for sure if you’d orter speak to one
of them—anyway, couldn’t find out where
any of them was: just think, I said to
this feller, live your whole life and never
15see a president: course I heard from
the president: he sent for Luke, you remember
Luke: and then every year I send down
there whatever I got clear: sometimes
I think maybe I don’t even live in this
20country or Washington ain’t in the country,
one: it gets pretty fuzzy: but the Bible
talks about kings and Nineveh: I reckon
I know more about Nineveh than Washington.
1974 (1977)
One Extreme to the Other
Three or four miles across
the lake the ridge land looks
like an ocean: it waves
and rolls, but slow:
5slopes and rondures tell it
got there flowing, if only
rising or dissolving:
walking, I don’t fear my
fluency with such an averager.
(1978)
Thoroughfaring
Thelma had liver spots on her forehead
from age thirty or thirty-five on
and, several children later, a few
operations, and, I think, pellagra:
5she died, though, fairly old in her late
seventies, struck in the head by a big piece
of farm machinery taking up too much road:
she was walking home between two houses she
could see, one where she was born, one
10where she bore others: later on, a
locomotive split one of her sons in half—
lengthwise on a bright railroad rail.
(1979)
Spring Lines
for Jonathan Williams
Though the northering geese
lines wobble from sweep-v’s
to longsided hooks to blue
hedgerow racers still they
17are as constant through the
thousands of years as the ridge
line cut steadfast in
stone across steadfast sky.
(1979)
Maple
The gray squirrels, fall-fat, having
given in and let the few seeds farthest
out go, the small red squirrel, just
before snow, breaks out like a tiny fire
5and, clean sweep, presents to winter a tree so
naked you wouldn’t believe it survives.
1979 (1980)
Quick Song
The earth is so little!
We fly in, light, fly away.
Memory, where did
_________
we come from, stop,
5what was
the loss we lost?
Never mind. We fell
awake in
sleep and slept again.
(1980)
Spiritual Progress
It drags on a way and, beaten down, dies:
there may be a nice thing now and then (certainly,
there is hope for nice things, a swerve away from
the regular, a coloration unghastly, as if the
5universe’s own remission, an astonishment like
provoking a smile with a smile some morning)
but it drags on, wears white, polishes blur-thin,
then lunges forward into hereafter: that action,
flare up, at the end, unassured and maybe not
10expected, the being caught up closing out, can
be usefully distracting, a wakefulness
too alert for grief or regret, a blank start.
(1981)
The Gathering
Where does the locus lie
or stand, high in a mind-dome
all arcs
of knowledge or perception
_________
5intersect, a dome constructed
not just of the mind’s
own materials
but the world’s outside,
the knowledg
es brought in
10and flung to the mind’s motions
for shaping: or isn’t
the dome, if any, actually
outside, heavenward, beyond
moon haulings or
15sun centerings,
a summary place so high & fine
its point of equipoise might
miss matter altogether,
lying, rising, or falling
20intermediately, containing
no matter though calling it all
into alignment, and
that dome perceived, hoped or
imagined, isn’t the mind’s a copy,
25a lessened figure, if legitimate
with accurate outline:
where is the essence of a perception
or thought, come to think of it:
and what good is a knowledge
30only questions trace into defining,
the truest knowledge the richest
gathering of forming doubt:
love, the dumb & tugging yearning,
undermines us into
35simpler motions, the lure a single
place and that place
circulating throughout us:
is the dome, the arc-nexus,
something love fashioned,
40the sweetest burden
to impose on the galaxies: maybe, for
inwardly the libido issues from
summary extensions, flows through
our wishes, minds without obstruction
45(or bleakly with), goes outside
and includes what is and builds
it up, so that the dome stands
radiant as an eye,
transfixing as the majesty of
50a nipple not yet touched:
or does love go just so far,
its net gathering the couplings,
families, friends, peoples
but then transferring its force
55to the severe redemptions of
harsh necessity: when we lie
dying, what are we to think:
of the light that would seem
to have no undoing in the head
60even though commonly the
head rots off: or are we to think
on the unending brilliance
way overhead that doesn’t quail to
darkness, but may never have
_________
65known it produces us or lets
us go: how could we have been
produced except by knowing means:
there in the center the face
we’ve found freedom to impose
70without imposition invites us to
come along, saying yes to losses:
beyond the sun, the mind’s sun shines.
1983 (1984)
Plain Divisions
Limber and fluttery as lombardies,
not half as tall and not well-neighbored
with fellows in a windbreak row,
he felt the cold coming, the northwind
5spilling geese south in a high slide:
and not like the lombardies confined
to one place, he felt the shivery
embranchments of maybe he should go or
not, blowing away worse or not than
10being blown against or up (winds hunt roots)—
where are the wind’s roots, where are the twists
the northwind unwinds wound, that
test the roots of the rootless lonely:
he shook like a concert of leafless
15particulars, the geese quick-talking overhead.
1976 (1985)
Taking Place
Some of these old widow women around here are roving
loners: no matter how deep the snow or bitterly near
zero the air, they are long-gaited out in their boots
and gone: one woman’s high hip, a radial, spins each
5step outwardly in advancing: and one’s eyes set ahead
behind gravity-laced curtains
just so as to miss the tips of cedars and fix on
the distant ridge: and one carries a droopy net bag
emptied or to be filled though neither empty nor full
10that suggests she could take off on a long trip at any
moment in any direction without the slightest
inconvenience or surprise: one has a leaning shoulder so
she sidles listing, listening with one side of her
head and eyeing the ditch at once, but
15I’ve seen her on both sides of town in a morning:
I don’t know where they go, not out to eat, because
often they don’t have their teeth in, I don’t know what
they buy or sell: mostly they go, perhaps it is the motion,
going, and, going, they rise through lattices of
20achievement till enchantment fills their heads with
sky and the wind rises in them like love or death, and
will designs them a mind of its own and makes it up.
1979 (1985)
Breaking for the Broken
There is no listener in the universe—
I thought my words, careful sayings,
would be heard by a lasting presence
_________
and not just heard
5but heard revised by undiminishable
understanding, my flaws
shocked clear, my foolishness filled
out and bent right—
the hearing of my misguidances,
10the tiny screaming
of the once and for all hurt,
the hearing that would build the true
poem never getting back to me:
but there is no fine listener out there
15and the robin doesn’t listen and the brook
doesn’t, neither do the simplest
noxious or sweet weeds, and
the lake answers not in my kind
when it rises or ruffles: child, perhaps,
20old woman, maybe, or young man
thrown away—these who may sound out
a few syllables and not even mumble the puzzlers
or who may be abused to words as a resort,
tears more punctuation than
25sense can stand, or who may listen
to get the sound of saying better right—
these hapless are among my sweetest listeners
and if they hear (they may not know how)
hearing may do them good a minute
30where the eternal
_________
altitudes overspan too much majesty
to break the silence over, hold to
a majesty sense only manages to blemish.
1979 (1986)
Could Be
When I
am with
someone I
feel the
5company may
not be
all it
could be
(1986)
Marking Time
The male ringneck picks across hard
snow at dawn, his tail feathers
flustered sideways in the side wind,
but his head down against the wind,
5he is as in fight or strut, his mind
on hens, March roaring up on the east rim
behind him: he fades into a brush
spot and, out of wind into breeze,
his tail feathers fall sleek
_________
10and he slinks like a brook trickle
into hiding: how right hedgerows along
snowfields are for lone pheasant.
1982 (1986)
Noted Imposition
Some people say why
be a pastoral poet when
there’s no more
pasture, just
5blacktop and gas spills
(still room in Montana
but its reality
isn’t
concentrated):
what’s wrong, I say,
10with a few illusory sheep
(they don’t take up much
room even in Montana)
or pill-less nymphs
dousing or douching in
15fountains now & then
or a moon with no small
steps on it: why be
mere redundance to
city soot and waste
20water from kill floors:
pipes never trilled to any
real world, not even the
pastoral, but any
place they trill is
25a goodly, pleasant land.
(1986)
Summer Fashion
The beachscene’s gulls
and busted shells,
beach fleas and the dark
eyes of the fiddlercrab holes,
5how trivial,
poetic, and old!
now high tide scallops
up the beach
and plants a plastic daisy
10at your feet, streaks out