The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1
Page 11
solidification from possibility:
how you buy a factory:
determine the lines of
55force
leading in and out, origins, destinations of lines;
determine how
from the nexus of crossed and bundled lines
the profit is
60obtained, the
forces realized, the cheap made dear,
and whether the incoming or outgoing forces are stronger
and exactly why,
and what is to be done:
65raw material inventory is
in winter
high: river frozen, must make half-year provisions,
squirrel-like, last till thaw, is
a warehousing problem: comes from England,
70Germany (West):
important to keep a ready
stock of finished goods—customers won’t wait, will
order from parent companies in England, Germany:
property taxes: things are
75changing, you may get a rail siding here soon:
profit and loss sheet, cash flow, receivables:
large lot, vacancy providing for the future:
good machineshop and
here are the production lines:
80how many heads on those machines: pcs per hr:
wages, skilled
unskilled: cut-off machines, annealing ovens, formers:
“I’ll say! 15 below this morning.”
order backlog: “I would say we have
85an edge,
growth possibility: 50 good customers, pharm-
aceutical houses: you have to understand the background.”
Perspective.
“Eight years ago . . . finally, I had to go to
90Ottawa . . . left good man here, Oh, yes, he’s done
fine . . . Swiss, later in Johannesburg;
you understand, management
wouldn’t consider
selling him out, too much of himself”: un-
95favorable points: competition, international market,
low tariffs,
unprotected, only advantage personalized service
to local
accounts, could
100buy elsewhere,
large firms in States have bigger machines, faster,
more production per hour
(more overhead, too)
“being small’s our advantage . . . can adapt, work with
105short runs of specialties—customers want
their own designs, premium,
made-to-order prices . . .”
Montreal,
“sure to see McGill U., ice sculpture front of
110each dorm, emblem”
cornless lawns,
Cartier going through the motions of worship,
Indians looking up at sky, too,
can’t see what:
115“We’ll get that information to you”
further study
and in the deep cold night boarding train, bedroom,
Yassuh,
and heat connections broken, cold, next morning
120going uptrain for toast and coffee,
that’s where East River turns—Manhattan:
lines of force, winding, unwinding,
nexus coiling in the mind:
balance, judge: act.
1961
CORSONS INLET (1965)
for Family, for Friends
Visit
It is not far to my place:
you can come smallboat,
pausing under shade in the eddies
or going ashore
5to rest, regard the leaves
or talk with birds and
shore weeds: hire a full grown man not
late in years to oar you
and choose a canoe-like thin ship:
10(a dumb man is better and no
costlier; he will attract
the reflections and silences under leaves:)
travel light: a single book, some twine:
the river is muscled at rapids with trout
15and a birch limb
will make a suitable spit: if you
leave in the forenoon, you will arrive
with plenty of light
the afternoon of the third day: I will
20come down to the landing
(tell your man to look for it,
the dumb have clear sight and are free of
visions) to greet you with some made
wine and a special verse:
25or you can come by shore:
choose the right: there the rocks
cascade less frequently, the grade more gradual:
treat yourself gently: the ascent thins both
mind and blood and you must
30keep still a dense reserve
of silence we can poise against
conversation: there is little news:
I found last month a root with shape and
have heard a new sound among
35the insects: come.
1961 (1962)
Moment
He turned and
stood
in the moment’s
height,
5exhilaration
sucking him up,
shuddering and
lifting
him
10jaw and bone
and he said
what
destruction am I
blessed by?
1963 (1963)
Winter Scene
There is now not a single
leaf on the cherry tree:
except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,
5in pure clarity, squalls:
then every branch
quivers and
breaks out in blue leaves.
1963 (1964)
Corsons Inlet
I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
5rounded a naked headland
and returned
along the inlet shore:
it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,
crisp in the running sand,
10some breakthroughs of sun
but after a bit
continuous overcast:
the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
15straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
of sight:
I allow myself eddies of meaning:
20yield to a direction of significance
running
like a stream through the geography of my work:
you can find
in my sayings
25swerves of action
like the inlet’s cutting edge:
there are dunes of motion,
organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance
in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:
30but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events
I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting
beyond the account:
in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of
primrose
35more or less dispersed;
disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows
of dunes,
irregular swamps of reeds,
though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all . . .
40predominantly reeds:
I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
from outside: I have
drawn no lines:
45as
manifold events of sand
change the dune’s shape that will
not be the same shape
tomorrow,
so I am willing to go along, to accept
50the becoming
thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish
no walls:
by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek
to undercreek: but there are no lines, though
55change in that transition is clear
as any sharpness: but “sharpness” spread out,
allowed to occur over a wider range
than mental lines can keep:
the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:
60black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk
of air
and, earlier, of sun,
waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,
caught always in the event of change:
65a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals
and ate
to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,
picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy
turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits:
70risk is full: every living thing in
siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small
white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears
the shallows, darts to shore
to stab—what? I couldn’t
75see against the black mudflats—a frightened
fiddler crab?
the news to my left over the dunes and
reeds and bayberry clumps was
fall: thousands of tree swallows
80gathering for flight:
an order held
in constant change: a congregation
rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable
as one event,
85not chaos: preparations for
flight from winter,
cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps,
beaks
at the bayberries:
90a perception full of wind, flight, curve,
sound:
the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:
the “field” of action
with moving, incalculable center:
95in the smaller view, order tight with shape:
blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:
snail shell:
pulsations of order
in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,
100broken down, transferred through membranes
to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no
lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together
and against, of millions of events: this,
so that I make
105no form of
formlessness:
orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override
or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain
the top of a dune,
110the swallows
could take flight—some other fields of bayberry
could enter fall
berryless) and there is serenity:
no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,
115or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:
terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities
of escape open: no route shut, except in
the sudden loss of all routes:
120I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory:
still around the looser, wider forces work:
I will try
to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
125scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
1962 (1963)
Dunes
Taking root in windy sand
is not an easy
way
to go about
5finding a place to stay.
A ditchbank or wood’s-edge
has firmer ground.
In a loose world though
something can be started—
10a root touch water,
a tip break sand—
Mounds from that can rise
on held mounds,
a gesture of building, keeping,
15a trapping
into shape.
Firm ground is not available ground.
1963 (1963)
Street Song
Like an
eddying willow leaf
I stand
on the street
5and turn:
people,
both ways coming
and going
around me, swirl:
10probably I
am no stiller—
detached; but
gold is
coming
15into my veins.
1963 (1964)
Lines
Lines flying in, out: logarithmic
curves coiling
toward an infinitely inward center: lines
weaving in, threads lost in clustral scrawl,
5weaving out into loose ends,
wandering beyond the border of gray background,
going out of vision,
not returning;
or, returning, breaking across the boundary
10as new lines, discontinuous,
come into sight:
fiddleheads of ferns, croziers of violins,
convoluted spherical masses, breaking through
ditchbanks where briar
15stem-dull will
leave and bloom:
haunch line, sickle-like, turning down, bulging, nuzzling
under, closing into
the hidden, sweet, dark meeting of lips:
20the spiraling out
or in
of galaxies:
the free-running wavy line, swirling
configuration, halting into a knot
25of curve and density: the broken,
irreparable filament: tree-winding vines, branching,
falling off or back, free,
the adventitious preparation for possibility, from
branch to branch, ash to gum:
30the breaker
hurling into reach for shape, crashing
out of order, the inner hollow sizzling flat:
the longnecked, uteral gourd, bass line
continuous in curve,
35melodic line filling and thinning:
concentrations,
whirling masses,
thin leaders, disordered ends and risks:
explosions of clusters, expansions from the
40full radial sphere; return’s longest chance:
lines exploring, intersecting, paralleling, twisting,
noding: deranging, clustering.
1960 (1963)
Coon Song
I got one good look
in the raccoon’s eyes
when he fell from the tree
came to his feet
5and perfectly still
seized the baying hounds
in his dull fierce stare,
in that recognition all
decision lost,
10choice irrelevant, before the
battle fell
and the unwinding
of his little knot of time began:
Dostoevsky would think
15it important if the coon
could choose to
be back up the tree:
or if he could choose to be
wagging by a swamp pond,
20dabbling at scuttling
crawdads: the coon may have
dreamed in fact of curling
>
into the holed-out gall
of a fallen oak some squirrel
25had once brought
high into the air
clean leaves to: but
reality can go to hell
is what the coon’s eyes said to me:
30and said how simple
the solution to my
problem is: it needs only
not to be: I thought the raccoon
felt no anger,
35saw none; cared nothing for cowardice,
bravery; was in fact
bored at
knowing what would ensue:
the unwinding, the whirling growls,
40exposed tenders,
the wet teeth—a problem to be
solved, the taut-coiled vigor
of the hunt
ready to snap loose:
45you want to know what happened,
you want to hear me describe it,
to placate the hound’s-mouth
slobbering in your own heart:
I will not tell you: actually the coon
50possessing secret knowledge
pawed dust on the dogs
and they disappeared, yapping into
nothingness, and the coon went
down to the pond
55and washed his face and hands and beheld
the world: maybe he didn’t:
I am no slave that I
should entertain you, say what you want
to hear, let you wallow in
60your silt: one two three four five:
one two three four five six seven eight nine ten:
(all this time I’ve been