The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2
Page 70
lane, rust streaks out of the sides of mountains, field manure;
10strangeness, terrifying interest are born many ways, come into
_________
your life, dixie bandits in your grocery bags, parasites, maybe
tropical, in dixie bandits’ bellies: fungus: the outside crumbles in:
you come in from pulling up weeds and strive to grind the green
stain from your fingers, but what traces have you left in turning
15on the faucet: traces will spread, hand to hand, person to
person, vein-out into scary leavings: where, in a vagueness worse
than mist, will it all finally play out as separate molecules,
the dose down to neutrality: I, personally, used to thank God
for the two oceans, one air, one water, the two gigantic
20diffusers, because, I thought, we the people won’t make enough stuff
too concentrated for the great oceans’ mellowing: but, now,
I don’t know who to thank, the oceans having turned milkish:
I suppose we’ll have to iron out, or ironize, a place in our heads
we imagine stark pure and take whatever comfort we can find
25residing there: if not a place, then a quality, such as a hum,
a dull constancy, a sermon on semblance, imitating everlastingness,
an effect 80-proof oblivion: might as well keep still with that,
a doldrummed acre among pitching mounds: distance refines: boulders
far off are whiffy-iffy: and tumultuous arisings in the present lean
30away into fine lines of consistency way away: the smoothest skin
is, up close, mountainous—dry gulch and gullywasher:
addling instants ease off with time: but old things recalled,
brought back, shed reconciliations and bubble us again: I ne’er
do well except doing ne’er-do-welling well: level’s level both ways.
1985 (1987)
Motion Which Disestablishes Organizes Everything
William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 84) is to be
commended for penning one of our finest recommendations for the bright outlook:
he was so miserable himself he knew how to put a fine point on the exact
prescription: he knew that anybody who knows anything about human
5existence knows it can be heavy; in fact, it can be so heavy it can undo
its own heaviness, the knees can crumple, the breath and heart beat,
not to mention the bowels, can become irregular, etc.: but the world,
William knew, sardonic and skeptical, can characterize sufferers of such
symptoms malingering wimps, a heaviness not to be welcomed by a person who
10like me feels like one of those: weight begets weight and nature works as well
(and mindlessly) down as up; you have to put English of your own into
the act misleading the way into lightenings: brightness, however
desirable, is a losing battle, though, and James knew it can be depended on
more often than not that folks won’t have spare brightnesses on them every
15morning that they want your heaviness to cost them: so, in general, if
someone asks how you are, no matter how you are, say something nice: say,
“fine,” or “marvelous morning,” and, this way, hell gradually notches up
toward paradise, a misconstruction many conspire to forward because
_________
nearly all, maybe all, prefer one to the other: oppositions make things costly:
20crooked teeth encourage the symmetry of braces but as soon as everybody’s
teeth are perfect, crooked teeth misalign: something is always working
the other way: if you let the other way go, you get more in Dutch for
while the other way at first may constitute an alternative mainstream,
pretty soon it breaks up into dispersive tributaries and splinters a
25rondure of fine points into branches and brooklets till it becomes
impossible to get a hold on it, a river system running backwards:
be bright: that is a wish that can be stable: you can always think of
happiness because it’s wished right out of any rubbings with reality, so
you can keep the picture pure and steady: I always imagine a hillock,
30about as much as I can get up these days, with a lovely shade tree and under
the tree this beautiful girl, unnervingly young, who projects golden
worlds: this scene attracts me so much that even though I’m a little
scared by it it feels enlivening, a rosy, sweet enlivening: poets
can always prevent our hubris, reminding us how the coffin slats peel
35cloth and crack in, how the onset of time strikes at birth, how love falters,
how past the past is, how the eyes of hungry children feed the flies.
1985 (1987)
Forerunners
A leaf, loose
in spring thaw,
skitters
_________
over peppery snow-holds
5and slips
on its spine down
the blacktop,
the wind
underlofting it,
10like rapids under
a skiff: it’s merry:
spring is going
to come again:
dead leaves
15scratch
out the news first,
while
the real
spring’s lily shoots,
20tipped green,
lie packed in ice.
(1987)
Slights of Sight
In moderate calm one
waits to see which
leaf on the maple will
go next:
5the leaves are yellow,
green-ribbed yellow, and
_________
green: not a green
one next, surely:
and not a green-ribbed
10one, either, unless
a local twist
knots the breeze:
there goes one,
yellow, likely, a
15foot into fall, the letting go
too unexpected to catch,
the absence on the
branch hardly to be found.
1974 (1987)
Rosalie
My pretty cousin, the hairdresser,
died at thirty, her belly
bigger than a prize pumpkin
but not with anything welcome
5on earth: she twisted because
she wanted the thing lifted out
of her, but it was heavier
than she was and more securely
hers than she was the world’s:
10she said waking up from the shots
the scriptures were
true because she’d just seen
_________
paradise:
I’d ridden my bicycle over to see
15her, frogs clunking in along
the brimming ditches by
the pinewoods, green stuff
piling up scumfloats
on the marsh water, and I thought
20how fine paradise must be:
for her anything earthless would do.
1985 (1988)
Generally Clear with Scattered Slippery Spots
When consistency forms a current
and drags, as by eddies and
swirls, practically
everything with it, there will
5still be those heisted bedraggled
on the shore or staring off
as at a comet the other way and
there, if the consistency
was not ours, will we bestow
10our remnant hope—till our
possibility be dashed or posed:
thank
goodness, the majority
sometimes stalls and dries up,
sweet uncertainty having
15cut its supply back, so that
then the minorities—even,
as in my case, one of one—can
kickdust through
_________
observing the ruins with the
20special pleasures of abandon’s
retribution: the mixtures!
how generous even when they let
the big stuff get by & take place:
if you’re mine, I’m yours, why worry.
1982 (1988)
Saving Account
They say the best way to be saved is to know
you’re lost right from the start: that way you don’t
spend your days in the servitude of false hope
and act crazy, or waste your time waiting on
5corners for a bus nobody drives: when you know
you’re lost, making the most of that acquires
cutting meaning—you can have what there is to have
and let it go when it’s over; but
if you build elaborate structures on earth to
10house eternal volitions or accumulated virtues, you live
in bogus safeguard and in terror
of time’s subtlest key: how far I’ve gotten
is to think it undecided still, the matter
staved off, possible still to go
15the saving way: I have that edge to eliminate:
so far, I allow a slit just before the end where
exhilarated by the distraction of going down, I
will be able to endure going, cosy and
_________
costless till then, forget it: but if I improve,
20the slit will become a ditch that will become a gap
and rush at me with the abyss: then I’ll be truly
found: my motions thereafter will be within
the proper scale and stance and everything I love
will burn ashen in the brightness of the usual destruction.
(1988)
Spot Check
The least boring way
for a remaining thing
to remain (one
doesn’t want the too-lordly
5unbudging radiant glob
or globe)
is to keep changing,
not essentially but
in aspect, degree,
10proportion or weight,
the mix so mixed one
never sees clear parameters
or the constant immovable
surrounding, the jail
15where change
is as illusory
as freedom: belief,
like spitting in the water,
makes a center anywhere.
(1988)
Commissary
What sort of person in
drought puts a saucer of water out
for hornets: maybe
their placid pulsing
5at drink
allures and dreams him:
maybe he needs to appease bees, too,
or wasps or
those glimmery little fellows
10too small to name:
or he’s seen a hornet
snip a silk-hung worm
from the air under a bough
and liked the address:
15I’d as lief
watch a day lily sway:
I don’t have a thing for
porcelain or stings:
but it’s okay with me:
20anything you starve is food,
anything you feed kills.
1973 (1988)
Time after Time
A colleague dies and is cremated,
and I drive by his place to see if
any leftover genius sways the
pines, wraps a drain,
5or drifts, schooled as fog,
through boughs, but
_________
the pointy fence, the driveway
register absence, not the man,
this fellow lately sharp on Speroni
10Speroni or local birds no longer in the
universe, so much less at home: but
I remember his recent, slender book
of poems and find in the library
his voice sounding like
15the memory of the mortal one
though with more definition
than morning coffee breaks allowed,
his sound more centrally himself, now,
than in the distractions and
20dailinesses of when he was here.
(1988)
The Surprise of an Ending
A system of necessity much elaborated
becomes allowance’s very possibility:
when on a clear day a flurry billows
through can the snowflakes mingling in
5breezy contours be out on anything but occasion,
points brought fine on the casual: and
if a twig, bark-fleck, catches
a fluff-bit (so many form differently approximately
the same in it) out of motion, clamping still,
10doesn’t that soft touch jar breath:
is freedom more real than freedom’s illusions:
can the wind unwind knots into
waving strands or can it skirt free, the streaks
brightening white-edged, bruising back into melt:
15can the gray energy of the ineluctable,
boiling brimstone, sufficiently bear light?
1983 (1988)
Work Notes
1
put
your foot in finework:
do flowers with a
housepaint brush:
5subtlety will like
ice-filigree crunch,
give, nabs
of imposition dissolving
to the new
10possibility
2
observe somewhere
fine edging
and you won’t
need to
15everywhere or elsewhere
3
a color become
predominant
can, extended to
the limit,
20recede:
the dominant
subsumed into background,
a flick of color
takes the eye
4
25instability
provides the motion, stir;
imbalance, the procedure:
composition just catches
the rondures still
5
30on photography—
painting also takes
a picture
not there
6
do
35a thing, its opposite
takes place:
distortion
straightens and
breadth fines
40lines: brightness
darkens
(1988)
Castaways
One goes for speech to the hill-line because it doesn’t speak:
the sun eases down behind the hill-line, and turquoise
and vermilion well up from the sinking, spreading west-wide,
_________
north to south—such a radiant darkening—but the welling,
5from indifference, is indifferent, and the whole of one’s presence
is allowed without exception or reproof to be present there:
and no damning imperatives take shape in any language in the
clouds: the stars, planets appearing say nothing but
permit the full disclosure of one’s own projections unrevised:
10happy nature, we call it, that lets us meet it all the way,
love everything we can about it and ourselves, including our
indifference: the human face can cut one back, diminish one
to known predispositions, so that one c
omes to hear human
speech as hardly more than a drift of oneself: where there is
15much difference, one longs to be gone to allowance so wide
it fills the whole range: where the strictured human face dims
dimmer than stone, its voice, scorn, its speech shearing
away the wrong differences—a face to dream indifference from.
(1989)
Settlements
Frail houses for quake zones every time
(a house built to
last can shatter—not the giving of the willow-withe’s
slender permanence)
5and from