The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1
Page 8
5the sun midafternoon through the blooms
and you
watch lovers and single people
go over the steep moonbridge at the pond’s narrows
where flies nip circles
10in the glass
and vanish in the widening sight except for an uncertain
gauze memory of wings
and as you sip from the small thick cup
held bird-warm
15in the hands
you watch
the people
rising on the bridge
descend into the pond,
20where bridge and mirrorbridge merge
at the bank
returning their images to themselves:
a grove
of pepper trees (sgraffito)
25screens them into isolations of love or loneliness:
it is enough from this to think in the green tea scent
and turn to farther things:
when the spirit comes to the bridge of consciousness
and climbs higher and higher
30toward the peak no one reaches live
but where ascension
and descension meet
completing the idea of a bridge
think where the body is,
35that going too deep
it may lose touch,
wander a ghost in hell
sing irretrievably in gloom,
and think
40how the spirit silvery with vision may
break loose in high wind
and go off weightless
body never to rise or spirit fall again to unity,
to lovers strolling through pepper-tree shade:
45paradise was when
Dante
regathered from height and depth
came out onto the soft, green, level earth
into the natural light, come, sweat, bloodblessings,
and thinning sheaf of days.
1959 (1960)
Requiem
1.
Mind
The strawberries along the roadbank in the hills bloomed,
the starwhite petals brilliant and melty in the sun as frost:
a glimmer of angels through the pines
rained fine needles, blanketing the rich fruit.
5On Rome’s hills stand Respighi’s musical pines,
aural columns of light, beingless but with minds.
Rising from banana trees in Mexico one, beyond
the clouds, comes into skies of pines on rocky tops.
Thus when I saw the strawberries, I rose into the singing trees
10and the angels, white
sharks in a glittering sea,
massacred me.
My blood drops still to the red pulp of wild strawberries
whose white shark flowers
15will call any man into the waters of the boughs.
Oh my mind runs down the moon’s glass tears
and plucks them up (tektites) frozen from the land.
No creation equals a moment’s consciousness.
No cymbal cones and crashes peaks so.
20No white shark stabs so.
Along the blade the dune thistle blows,
opening thorny hemispheres
of yellow florets half-deep in purple stain,
and spears of onion grass rise sleek and clean
25from the gray and gritty sand.
To stand with landward hair enduring these
requires sharks in the eyes, the backing of seas.
The coffin-carrier cries and the crow “cars” over the salt creeks.
2.
Event
The day after,
30after the golden culminations and unfuneraled dead,
after the nuclear trees drifting
on cloudy stems,
and the fruits of knowledge
and the knowledge of those golden high-capped trees,
35flaking, settling out,
after the transfigurations
and dark visitations,
groans and twitching resentments,
after the golden culminations
40and the trunks of violent trees stalking the vacant land,
there rose an irrelevant dawn:
the white shell lay spiraled on the beach as it had lain
and the surf, again unheard,
eased to primal rhythms
45of jellyfishing heart, breaking into mind;
ants came out and withered in the sun;
the white shark
sucked at the edge of the sea on the silent, scarlet morning;
and all the white souls sailing
50sailed, funneling out into eternity;
by the wharf, dolphin bobbled
belly-up with his poet, all his nudging sea-cleaning done;
briery the earth, iced
with bones, rolled into time.
3.
Contraction
55Repenting creation, God said,
As you know, I Am,
God,
because I do not have to be consistent:
what was lawful to my general plan
60does not jibe
with my new specific will;
what the old law healed
is reopened
in the new.
65I have drawn up many covenants to eternity.
Returning silence unto silence,
the Sumerian between the rivers lies.
His skull crushed and moded into rock
does not leak or peel.
70The gold earring lies in the powder
of his silken, perished lobe.
The incantations, sheep trades, and night-gatherings
with central leaping fires,
roar and glare still in the crow’s-foot
75walking of his stylus on clay.
Under surgery the sick man rolls and
vomits on the temple floor,
the anesthetic words of reciting priests
licking grooves through his frantic mind.
80The dust has dried up all his tears.
He sleeps out the old unending drug of time.
The rose dies, man dies, the world dies, the god
grows and fails, the born universe dies
into renewal,
85and all endures the change,
totally lost and totally retained.
1957 (1959)
Guide
You cannot come to unity and remain material:
in that perception is no perceiver:
when you arrive
you have gone too far:
5at the Source you are in the mouth of Death:
you cannot
turn around in
the Absolute: there are no entrances or exits
no precipitations of forms
10to use like tongs against the formless:
no freedom to choose:
to be
you have to stop not-being and break
off from is to flowing and
15this is the sin you weep and praise:
origin is your original sin:
the return you long for will ease your guilt
and you will have your longing:
the wind that is my guide said this: it
20should know having
given up everything to eternal being but
direction:
how I said can I be glad and sad: but a man goes
from one foot to the other:
25wisdom wisdom:
to be glad and sad at once is also unity
and death:
wisdom wisdom: a peachblossom blooms on a particular
tree on a particular day:
30unity cannot do anything in particular:
are these the thoughts you want me to think I said but
the wind was gone and there was no more knowledge then.
1959 (1960)
Expressions of Sea Level<
br />
Peripherally the ocean
marks itself
against the gauging land
it erodes and
5builds:
it is hard to name
the changeless:
speech without words,
silence renders it:
10and mid-ocean,
sky sealed unbroken to sea,
there is no way to know
the ocean’s speech,
intervolved and markless,
15breaking against
no boulder-held fingerland:
broken, surf things are expressions:
the sea speaks far from its core,
far from its center relinquishes the
20long-held roar:
of any mid-sea
speech, the yielding resistances
of wind and water, spray,
swells, whitecaps, moans,
25it is a dream the sea makes,
an inner problem, a self-deep
dark and private anguish
revealed in small,
by hints, to
30keen watchers on the shore:
only with the staid land
is the level conversation really held:
only in the meeting of rock and
sea is
35hard relevance shattered into light:
upbeach the clam shell
holds smooth dry sand,
remembrance of tide:
water can go at
40least that high: in
the night, if you stay
to watch, or
if you come tomorrow at the right time,
you can see the shell caught
45again in wash, the
sand turbulence changed,
new sand left smooth: if
the shell washes loose,
flops over,
50buries its rim in flux,
it will not be silence for
a shell that spoke: the
half-buried back will
tell how the ocean dreamed
55breakers against the land:
into the salt marshes the water comes fast with rising tide:
an inch of rise spreads by yards
through tidal creeks, round fingerways of land:
the marsh grasses stem-logged
60combine wind and water motions,
slow from dry trembling
to heavier motions of wind translated through
cushioned stems; tide-held slant of grasses
bent into the wind:
65is there a point of rest where
the tide turns: is there one
infinitely tiny higher touch
on the legs of egrets, the
skin of back, bay-eddy reeds:
70is there an instant when fullness is,
without loss, complete: is there a
statement perfect in its speech:
how do you know the moon
is moving: see the dry
75casting of the beach worm
dissolve at the
delicate rising touch:
that is the
expression of sea level,
80the talk of giants,
of ocean, moon, sun, of everything,
spoken in a dampened grain of sand.
1962 (1963)
Unsaid
Have you listened for the things I have left out?
I am nowhere near the end yet and already
hear
the hum of omissions,
5the chant of vacancies, din of
silences:
there is the other side of matter, antimatter,
the antiproton:
we
10have measured the proton: it has mass: we
have measured the antiproton: it has negative mass:
you will not
hear me completely even at this early point
unless you hear my emptiness:
15go back:
how can I
tell you what I have not said: you must look for it
yourself: that
side has weight, too, though words cannot bear it
20out: listen for the things I have left out:
I am
aware
of them, as you must be, or you will miss
the non-song
25in my singing: it is not that words cannot say
what is missing: it is only that what is missing
cannot
be missed if
spoken: read the parables of my unmaking:
30feel the ris-
ing bubble’s trembling walls: rush into the domes
these wordy arches shape: hear
me
when I am
35silent: gather the boundaried vacancies.
1959 (1963)
Mechanism
Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,
morality: any working order,
animate or inanimate: it
has managed directed balance,
5the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,
some energy left to the mechanism,
some ash, enough energy held
to maintain the order in repair,
assure further consumption of entropy,
10expending energy to strengthen order:
honor the persisting reactor,
the container of change, the moderator: the yellow
bird flashes black wing-bars
in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,
15startles the hawk with beauty,
flitting to a branch where
flash vanishes into stillness,
hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:
honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
20the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
of control,
the gastric transformations, seed
dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,
25blood compulsion, instinct: honor the
unique genes,
molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into
sets, the nucleic grain transmitted
in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,
30some cells set aside for the special work, mind
or perception rising into orders of courtship,
territorial rights, mind rising
from the physical chemistries
to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male
35and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper
racial satisfaction:
heat kept by a feathered skin:
the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen
burner under the flask)
40so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates
interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum
efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame
staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and
necessary worked out of random, reproducible,
45the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the
goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations
that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a
great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.
1959
Batsto
After two gray sunless days of warm
noreaster windy rains the sun breaking
clear this morning, over the bayside
field the sparrowhawk foraging in the
5oval air, we took Route 9 north through
Pleasantville, past the pleasant
inviting cemetery crisp with light,
over the railroad, crosstown to the
Absecon meadows and into the sycamore
10leaf-letting hills beyond and through
the housing development with groves
of old leaf-keeping darker
oaks and
northward past Seaview Country Club
with the high round dining room and
15young rich men in casuals crossing the
street to the golf-links and on past
fields and hedges, the scarlotry of
maple leaves, sassafras and skinny
birch resplendent in the clean sun,
20the winding flat highway, empty
but for slight local traffic, and onto
Garden State Parkway to bridge the
wide-mouthed Mullica River that spreads
out in brown still meadows to the sea,
25an occasional gull, the skeletal
cedar upriver against the land, off
to secondary roads not too well marked
and along the north bank of the
Mullica westward into the Wharton
30Tract, now a state park, with ghost
towns and endless acres in neglect,
stopping at a pinerise to see the
cemetery of the French family, death
after more than a century light as
35the morning sun, where Thomas French,
a year older than his wife, lies since
1844, his wife three years later