by A. R. Ammons
the beach dunes nearby: or Gause’s Landing:
Lord, I wish I were home—those pastures—where I’ll
never be again: Spring Branch Church, South
Whiteville, New Brunswick: mother and father, aunts,
15uncles gone over, no one coming back again.
1974 (1993)
Somers Point
What are you doing out here
this windy on the headland
said the bay reeds bent inland,
_________
their bounding tassels like
5blurred drops trying to rain ashore,
the bay water thrashing
to land or get away to the open,
the holly, its held leaves
jangling tambourines, the
10whipping cypresses simmering and
seething:
oh I said I’ve come out here
to hide in the trembling
from my trembling, storm roars
15outsounding blood roars, sprints
of pulse surpassed by clacking leaves,
to count how many, many
particulars ease could come into.
(1993)
White Echo
The willow’s knotty threads
select scant weave from the flurry,
the threads fluffing up a little
to cotton on one side, but
5it’s so calm the flakes
barely find a side to come from,
a straight downward mingling
turning around as it sometimes does
midair as if to define
10ambient mounds of itself to hold
and keep or come back round to:
it’s hard to burden a skinny
willow down with snow—ice
would be a different matter, rain
15glazing and freezing swelling
laminations, a holding that could
split the willow’s giving, branch-splits
skinning the trunk, could, I hope
it won’t, this willow’s weeping
20so huge a summer somberness—
willow stringknots are fast
leeches (spring changes them into pollen
and leaves), the blunt end attached
to the string, the rest tapering
25downward so it won’t catch anything
unbearably heavy or only
the fluffiest flake on its hump or, of
course, the microinscriptions of
building rain: (soft, blurry snow
30blunders into airy holds): sifted
lightly on one side, though, with
snow, a whole tree-ghost can be
shattered free by a striking gust,
white dust stemless, traveling branchless,
35shaken whole off side till a breaking
current collapses the snow willow into willow.
(1993)
Pileup
Driving when
the snow’s
_________
this slick,
it’s hard
5(spinning, sliding)
to build
any momentum
up or
get rid
10of any.
(1993)
Ping Jockeys
Gosh! Imagine! How did it happen? I am
virtually a New York School poet (maybe not
virtually a poet!): I have affinities, old solid
ineradicable affinities: I just read Schuyler’s
5interview and learned 48 years later that I was
there in Key West (in the Navy, I mean) just about
when Schuyler and O’Hara (both) were, and we
sailed at dawn every day out on the trainer boats
catching on to sub chasing; we were younglings
10with special gifts of sound, striking sonarmen
discriminating pitch, doing theory, and learning how
to lay down depth-charge patterns on enemy hulks
(where was John, anyhow): oh, the Navy, the
sweet Navy, sound pinging out through the waters
_________
15of the Caribbean, later the Pacific, thrilling
the submarines deep down hustling to get away
or pop us off point-blank with a slim torpedo!
1993 (1994)
Keeping Track
It’s not going to be again the way it was:
Silver won’t come up from the pasture again
and stand, head low, dozing by the gate:
the sow won’t strike mouthfuls of wiregrass
5all day for a rushed bed to farrow in:
I won’t ever again hear my father at dusk
holler leatherbritches from the woodsroad
coming home or feel the start that things might
once be all right: the plank fence of the barnyard
10is down and gone, cornerposts rotted holes:
when my memory goes, my father’s never adzed
and mauled those boards from swamp-cut logs.
1983 (1994)
Cornell’s Wee Stinkie
The creek maidens long ago used to tinkle in
still trickles through campus: it
keeps finding its
way through big new construction and
5under paved streets and
loose footbridges:
_________
after rains, it carries along poplar leaves this
time of year and settles them against
stones in the bed,
10damming itself up into noticeable pools too cold
(and nearly too deep) to wade in:
then, on it goes.
(1994)
Candle Lit
Old friendlies
will sometimes in
the dead
of night
5flick their
choppers out
and rummaging
gum you
to the stars.
(1995)
Emerging Curves
Spot time conceals: wait long enough (for
how few things we have time to wait) the
face of the glacier splits off, the overhang
drops into sharp depth and comes up blue to
5its proper bob (so much so fast the long
preparation blinks): or take wet snow clumps
_________
sloped on a spirea bush’s finework: how long
it takes thawing drops to drop at forty degrees:
but by afternoon or maybe the next morning, the
10bush’s risen way out of nodding: I’ll never
know what becomes of this slope I live on:
I know the wind coming up’s high farther down
where the slope sheds sharply but what the wind’s
doing or what the brook’s going the other way
15are putting up or taking down the long sayings tell.
1974 (1996)
Sumerian Vistas
What but the declarations of nothingness shall we gather
the world around: buildings arise from buildings,
lattices of sunk rooms, partitions of held space, combed,
underground, so that buildings can be domes or attics
5to prior dwellings, one layer turned up into the
next, random assortments of crushed or tumbled stone,
block, brick recovered or brought in: but the new towers
become mounds which grassed over are hills in neglect,
odd interruptions of riparian plains: while, inside, whole
10pieces of wall may be standing, tiled, inscribed, embossed,
locked to sharp corners or foundation stones: but
nothingness, the groundwork brushing up from rockbottom,
permits definition to the arising, arising on arising carrying
cubicles, ancient airs, collapsed atria unguessed in the
15arc of declaration:
where an affirmation intrudes, all
_________
our affirmations bear the cut of it: Erech rose by river
wharfs, steps highwinding to the cool, tiled blue sancta,
but wind honed the mound away, and the river is off
across a mile of sand: the reeds that once
20picked up highwater weeds and dried them out to bird nesting,
the reeds glimmer in the heat-streams of nothingness:
nothingness is the rock, solid bottom, against nothingness the
level lies true, takes to, defining, beam and joist:
the wasted ziggurat shines in the permissions of nothingness.
1985 (1996)
Mucilage
Led off the arena with a noose around my neck,
bearing the leash of cowering humiliation &
degradation, I thought to myself, hey, between
facing one death and another is this interlude,
5life, and having escaped the first may I not
by grace or god, device or dare, sidestep
the second: by the time I hit the stoneshade
of the periphery, I believed in hope again:
the crowd was already rolling in some other
10emotional slush:
you may wonder, as I often have
and sometimes do, what I mean by all these
statements: well, of course, I mean the
statements as gestures, actions, jots and tittles
15of possibility, nods, smiles, words, thoughts,
_________
things which, summed up, will take on ambiance,
milieu, intermediacy, flow, these representing
existence which evidences certain values—
a willingness to be nearly honest, if that
20state is nearly approachable (if I go on too
long about this you will think I don’t
mean it): anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing
and tricks like this are unworthy of you:
what I really really mean to do, though, is
25to dissolve encrusted certainty: I believe in
definition, in limits and being fairly certain
about things, but I want ongoingness to have
always this power to break through bringing
upheaval and growth: I would like to have just
30enough structure so that when change hit it I’d
be left with a shambles: I can get along
with a shambles; I can prop it up or knock
a leg from under it or gradually replace it: I
don’t want a steel cell but on the other hand
35I don’t want to settle down in hurricanes or
floods: I like the mild passion of thinking
something reasonably so, or not: anyway,
they took me off, washed, scraped, oiled,
pounded and kneaded me, spritzed me with
40aromatics so witchingly fine you’d have to
get your nose nearly to the skin to be sure
scent was there, and they strapped me,
_________
arms and legs, on a kind of tilted catafalque,
a gold and silk fabric knotted around my waist
45and falling open below: lutes in tiers and
files of naked women lifted the dome of the
high place with spangled light and sweetest
sound: when the women swayed and turned,
their arms rising and falling into waves by
50their sides, I felt an unquenchable rush which
I could not reach to hide: what is a man to
do, his lust visible and no permissions
granted or sought: a most beautiful face
began to rise from my waist toward my face, and
55I looked directly into a pair of eyes and lips
so open and pure and gorgeous that I was
already swimming in dreams when the hand lightly
moved upward along my thigh, and then the face
went back where it came from and raptures
60dreams can’t conceive touched me: past the
cresting ecstasy, my heart subsiding, I saw
the face again, peeling itself away, shining
hair, eyelashes, glowing lips and revealing
the emperor, the very magnificence that had
65spared me even against the wishes of the crowd
(you take the word fucking—as in, who cut
the fucking tree down—a blustery effect that
almost hides fear from courage; a useful
word, for isn’t everything a pretense or a
_________
70substitution, integrity the biggest cover-up
of all: I know this woman, lady-like, lately
met, her first move is grinning obsequiousness,
this the paranoia alert, and sure enough she
comes up with trifle after puzzling trifle till
75the bulldozer that is her true nature
chugs: poor little thing, all she wants to
do is push the world off a cliff: beware such
who haunt you with niceties till your guts
form a lasso or a noose, one for you, one
80for her): the f word, tho, used
too frequently loses its force: why? the
doesn’t lose its force: but then one hardly
ever notices the, whereas, in polite society,
fucking is strong tonic, not, of course, in high
85society: those fuckers don’t care what they
say and can back up their vulgarity with moldy trust
funds: the slavish behave slavishly, even while
they wait to bulldoze the upper crust away:
& those of us (I mean, you) with a million a
90year income should recall from time to time the
splitting fine edge of the guillotine: walk
upon the bottom of your trust fund if you want
to cross the river of life: lake, I mean: the
river has a bad reputation: on the other side,
95it’s a gray area: walk along the bottom of the river
and you may have a non-round trip: my wife
says she feels sorry for this man she met the
other day: he had the look of someone who has
said yes all his life when he wanted to say no,
_________
100somebody like a suit salesman or accommodating
real estate salesman or professor or possibly
a L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poet, for, you know, a
language poet will think twice about anything if
he thinks it will get closer to the truth: yes,
105yes, you’re right, I’m only kidding: I’m not
typing or even talking, I’m yapping, and almost
anything will outlast this measly rhyme: it’s
metrical time for memory and next time around
maybe I’ll take that up: but this time it’s
110free verse for me: who wants to remember this
century’s mess: I think the main reason,
though, that I don’t have any subtle gestures,
withery gracious moves, is that I came from a low
religious caste, holy roller, where anything
115under a shout is insincere; I never sat in any
cool Presbyterian pew and considered the
startling differences in effect between 3¼ and
3½% interest over time: even Baptists held it down
a little: they even held it under, and their
120preachers talked just like they’d met somebody
on the road, neighborly like: my kind were afire
with the fire of the pentecost, although what
they were actually lit up about was where the
next meal or rag for their children would
125come from: the surface tells the truth every
time, but you
have to know how to read it right.
1992 (1998)
Clabberbabble
How usage changes usage: with so many people
in the cities, and so few geese, nobody is
silly as a goose anymore, and the word anserine
looks like something the w has been left out of:
5so unexpected; in fact, silly as a goose: makes
me think of some English hamlet, houses clustered