The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2
Page 71
frail houses the wind can
flash a sheet of pasteboard,
so what,
or stick-stanchions can wobble
10out of wire
and spill on the dancing ground:
a wall of light stuff (straw and bark)
can fly away from a family with
no consequence beyond a few scratches
15(slipped cinderblock walls or running beams
can keep folks under too long)
gorillas, houseless, feed on the move
and sleep lightly in folded boughs of high branches:
frail houses,
20frail
houses for
the meek, the lowly,
the have-nots,
the haunted restless,
25the pilgrims.
(1989)
Winter Crop
Sundown near, rose-mauve
backing
broken clouds running east,
starlings spill into the big
5oakand
bead it berry-dense:
the branches sprawl and
swing till
a twig, overloaded, pops
10triggering a whole picking,
the branches lashing,
released to the emptiness.
(1990)
Countercurrency
Heavy rains reshuffled the brook’s
chip-shale mounds, white gashes driving
trees horizontal:
ice calked and split
5the rifts of soaking in: high winds
turned root-wheels up
and cracked rock broke loose,
boulders rumbling the slopes:
I said to the mountain in these
10stormy, gullywashing times
height’s hard to hold on to
and the mountain, lessening to each
grain’s loss, giving in
to the leveling flat land
15turned about and turned about as
if to pull up to the clouds
but they were low
so the mountain set sail upon them.
(1990)
Time Being
Fate is a reading on what-is, merely,
a shadowy side of what-is, where
definition firms toward
an end that closes then gives up
5the form that was its currency:
what-is does not assume
direction, respond to local
time, or take sharp shape: spirit-like,
it is neither young nor
10old: it is come into and
_________
dwelt in when the shabby clutter
of the self strung on brilliant
and dark sequences
is given over and the self gives
15up and up to the one eternal
known, since the eternal, eternal,
can’t break down into knowledge
of itself, the mortal also lost
from the knowledge of itself,
20being then where being is:
apart from that eternity what
eternity is there for the self, oh,
none: when terror
turns to love, the deepest
25beholding, oblivion looks
like paradise, the whole place
not at all imagination’s work
but a real land we enter when
kissing the world goodbye we kiss
30the brow love needs no lips to kiss.
1977 (1991)
Religious Matters
Winnowy, chafflike, pelleted snow’s
been coming down in a dense
weave since dawn,
sprawling the bushes into loaded attitudes:
5the blue spruce looks ridiculous:
the lower branches, longest,
slump low: the middle
branches stick straight out, heaped
horizontals, and the uppers, least burdened,
10point up: that skews arrangement
into scrawny, awkward spaces:
ravaged out of rightness, a casualty,
nevertheless the spruce resembles
the reasonableness of casualty,
15a just openness to comedown,
a religious matter:
consider a man, never
more generous, religious, or ridiculous than
when making love, blood
20flowing, rhythm eager,
attention excellent, semen
building, ecstasy tightening: under
burden, poise uncertain, he makes
his best bid for the central:
25he comes away half
in a shambles, in need of shower,
talc, scent, deflated with expression,
rouge residual in his face:
the spruce
30holds to the weighty raggedness,
even if pleas to be winded sprightly
travel its needles: but starlight
may brighten its snow tonight: tomorrow
the sun may unlock all its prayers.
1972 (1991)
An Improvisation for Angular Momentum
Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
5into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
10except where
sight touches seen
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
15forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
20caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out,
25motions profound,
alive, musical!
Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother
does not desert us but comes to tend
and produce us, to make room for us
30and bear us tenderly, considerately,
through the gates, to see us through,
to ease our pains, quell our cries,
to hover over and nestle us, to deliver
us into the greatest, most enduring
35peace, all the way past the bother of
recollection,
beyond the finework of frailty,
the mishmash house of the coming & going,
creation’s fringes,
40the eddies and curlicues
(1991)
An Improvisation for the Pieties of Modernism
After Saturday’s all day pouring rain
taking all day
Sunday to clear off but really
clearing off water in the afternoon
5here is Monday
an October day
so windy
gold and red
yellow
10the in-filling all-capping blue sky
what can one think
adequate to the breadth or say or
feel
one feels that here the crests
15have met and it is time to eat
the banquet of life but
somehow one’s mouth misses
or it is not really food
but mirages discrete with show
or that life is delayed
out of this
even out of this when one cannot derive
a timelier or better opportunity
Earlier, my sister visiting here, we
25talked of the old, now all
in or near the grave, and
of our own growing old and
finding it hard to
admit the uprearing
30calamity, unsupposed
in spite of all, our days, to
o, to
be wound round spindles of nothingness
and terror, finding our end snuggling in the
earth as we meaninglessly once
35dozed in the long womb
long ago before all the fish
were fried
and before the circle had been noted
in the climbing arc
40before we knew brooks
parch out
or ledges loosen, splintery with
heat and flint-hard holding ice
(1991)
Harry Caplan
Harry Caplan’s not around anymore: that’s
the walk up from East Avenue he took
every day into his eighties, rain or
sleet, and those are the very steps he
5climbed to one entrance to Rockefeller
Hall: that tree, big oak, dropped summer
shade on him so many mornings and sprinkled
him with winter’s brittle twig shade:
that so much here when he
10was here is still here (while he is not),
so much the same as usual, breeze-easy,
the grass factoring in greens and
yellows, while he is elsewhere otherwise
in our minds—and his mind?—blurs
15the mirror and stumbles grief:
I remember the long ash on the cigarette
dangling from his side lip:
I had never thought we could get by without him.
(1991)
Oops
The only
way to
_________
do anything
at all
5about all
of western
culture is
to fail
to refer
10to it.
1979 (1992)
Following Tragedy
Airs acquire recency, youth’s
little time spent
become little to spend, and
startlement jars the hours
5awake: growing up, filling out,
and following through through, cut away,
a late world with frail commencement
in it commences,
the ending long ago to be anywhere
10now the one where: time blanked
out all new; dependable deluges,
knucklings under, or
ridings out sure to show: let’s get
going; this part ends the same
15way the first part ended—gone.
(1992)
Opinion’s Pinions
It’s probably not true that birds of most rapid wingbeat stand stillest
in the air: the hummingbird’s so still his wings can’t be seen:
whereas the buzzard, never still in high turning, is all wing: and
the albatross, or one of those seabirds, skins the waves and rarely
5beats at all: the middling sparrowhawk, though, thrashes
fast enough to stand still enough, maybe no sheer record either way: (he
doesn’t catch sparrows but grasshoppers!): the pigeon’s throb
turns into 40-mph rather than into standing: surely, there’s a
tenable generalization, a centralizing organization, in there somewhere:
10(what awful writing, nearly as bad, though not as good, as, say, Stevens
or Shelley or even blithering Yeats): great poets often don’t put their
docket on the line: they are under the grandeur of a pressure and every
now and then they strike a high moment and stumble into a defamation or
flushing turbulence: an excusable indeliberateness but not an excusable
15deliberateness, for anyone who has been to the heights doesn’t want to go
back: makes you wonder if they ever actually did get real high: but then
the best life’s not the best poetics: poets, like birds, can make
something out of whatever their wingbeat is—glide, soar, stand, swim, even:
doing anything is doing something and who’s to say when doing something
20becomes doing something: the other thing I’ve been thinking about the last
couple of days is just how closely obscurity and clarity stand for wilderness
and clearing: to be where Frost was—in the clearing—is to be in a
dwelling or settlement, a garden or farm or place to fish under a ledge
by a river, out of the wrestling confusions of primeval and primordial
25woods, with the haunts and hoot-owls, dark climbing vines and downrushes
of things, fallen limbs or roosts or dropped monkeybones: clearings and
wildernesses intermix, too: even in civilizations, clearings and mazes
_________
confuse doubly, labyrinths and precise minotaurs: as with the spirit, where
lucidity can trace clear roads till choice daunts desire and
30breakdown is right next door to fulfillment: take emptiness, an extreme
form of clearing, a place without substantial darkenings, traceless: this
frightens some as the resolution of all things left to resolve; hence, the
end: whereas for others, it is the unconditional source of all becoming,
the fountain or wellspring: since emotions can go either way, shy away from
35conceptual emotions and take under advisement the apparent tangible, the real
thing, what casts shadow, tastes good, feels good, smells right, holds still.
1985 (1993)
For Emily Wilson from a Newcomer
When it gets hot here it’s really noticeable:
clumps of copperheads unwind,
brotherly younglings, and form separate
rings of attention: maypop blossoms
5stretch wide open, nearly closing back on
themselves: black widows, keyed up,
traipse their mates off to dinner:
squirrels sail onto branches tailbone
fine and, swaying, hull nuts: joe-pye
10two-men tall on the creek banks blooms,
bonnets as pink and wide as parasols: but
Emily spells welcome warmer than any weather.
1974 (1993)
The Sale Sale
The day, a spring day already
dark and windy, has just blown
fourteen years away, a tag sale
down the street at Mr. Sale’s
5blue house, vultures lined up two
abreast all the way out to
and down the sidewalk waiting
for 3 P.M. and the fluttering greed
of the first rifling: Mr. Sale,
10a courteous, Southern person
originally from Kentucky, could
pitch sentences whose rise,
stoop and wheel hawks could
school clarity from: he had a way
15of being tough, reality’s honer,
and merry: in just fourteen years
he went from department
chairman, hosting dinners and
setting policy, to what a tag
20sale blows up: fourteen years
ago, when I lived elsewhere
otherwise, I heard his
voice on the phone offer me
a job I needed: now, even if
25I’m flattened, I admit to needing
nothing: Mr. Sale is
off somewhere, no wonder
_________
where, but still I’ll bet winking
precision’s wit: I raise a
30tear, sir, this windy day, to us.
1978 (1993)
Turning Things Out Good
When death shuts
the outside world down
and one spirals
in one’s own
5considerations, what
face will come up
or what fear break out, or
will the corethread’s
spi
nning emptiness
10just draw
one in or split open
into a sliding sheet,
bulbing and winding
beingless air,
15or what will one think:
will a thought ensphere
calming loving-goodness
and make of itself an
upward way, tunneling
20attractively, lighted
_________
with hope or some kind
of flashing doodad that
promotes sleep, a sleep
real dreams may hold up in.
(1993)
Alligator Holes Down Along About Old Dock
Lord, I wish I were in Hallsboro, over by the tracks,
or somewhere down past the Green Swamp around Nakina, or
traipsing, dabbling in the slipping laps of Lake Waccamaw:
how I wish I were over by Fair
5Bluff where the old Lumber River snakes under overhanging
cypress-moss, black glass going
gleamy deep and slow, ’gator easy and slow:
I bet a mockingbird’s cutting loose a Dido in wisteria
vine or mimosa bush over there right now: if I were
10down by Shalotte, the fish fries, scrubby sand-woods,