The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1
Page 12
counting spaces
while you were thinking of something else)
65mess in your own sloppy silt:
the hounds disappeared
yelping (the way you would at extinction)
into—the order
breaks up here—immortality:
70I know that’s where you think the brave
little victims should go:
I do not care what
you think: I do not care what you think:
I do not care what you
75think: one two three four five
six seven eight nine ten: here we go
round the here-we-go-round, the
here-we-go-round, the here-we-
go-round: coon will end in disorder at the
80teeth of hounds: the situation
will get him:
spheres roll, cubes stay put: now there
one two three four five
are two philosophies:
85here we go round the mouth-wet of hounds:
what I choose
is youse:
baby
1959 (1963)
Portrait
Dry-leaf life
curls up on
lobe toes
and like a lost
5or haunted crab
skitters
across the street,
fretting at
the wind,
10or curled forward
tumbles down or
even up a
rise, gay and
light as a
15spring catkin,
or boatlike strikes
a stream or, wet,
flattens
out stream-bottom
20in windless
black: come,
wind, away from
water and let
song spring &
25leap with this
paper-life’s
lively show.
1963 (1964)
Jungle Knot
One morning Beebe
found on a bank of the Amazon
an owl and snake
dead in a coiled embrace:
5the vine prints its coil too deep into the tree
and leaved fire shoots greens of tender flame
rising among the branches,
drawing behind a hardening, wooden clasp:
the tree does not
10generally escape
though it may live thralled for years,
succumbing finally rather than at once,
in the vine’s victory
the casting of its eventual death,
15though it may live years
on the skeletal trunk,
termites rising, the rain softening,
a limb in storm
falling, the vine air-free at last, structureless as death:
20the owl,
Beebe says, underestimated
the anaconda’s size: hunger had deformed
sight or caution, or
anaconda, come out in moonlight on the river bank,
25had left half his length in shade: (you
sometimes tackle
more than just what the light shows):
the owl struck talons
back of the anaconda’s head
30but weight grounded him in surprise: the anaconda
coiled, embracing heaving wings
and cry, and the talons, squeezed in, sank
killing snake and owl in tightened pain:
errors of vision, errors of self-defense!
35errors of wisdom, errors of desire!
the vulture dives, unlocks four eyes.
1961 (1963)
Dark Song
Sorrow how high it is
that no wall holds it
back: deep
it is that no dam undermines
5it: wide that it
comes on as up a strand
multiple and relentless:
the young that are
beautiful must die; the
10old, departing,
can confer
nothing.
1963 (1964)
Resort
Beautiful nature,
say
the neuter lovers
escaping
5man/woman nature,
man
fierce competitive,
woman
taunting
10treacherous:
regenerative nature,
they say
fingering the cool
red-dotted lichen
15on an old
water-holding
stump:
sweet neutrality,
a calm love where
20man and woman
are fang & fury.
(1964)
Upright
He said
I am mud
in a universe of stone and fire,
neither hard
5enough to last
nor expressed
in one
of those imperishable fires.
Be something
10the grassblade said
rising whitegreen
from common swamp.
I am he
said
15nothing &
feel better that
way.
The grassblade
said
20be like us
grass stone
and fire and
pass.
Mud is
25nothing
and eternal.
1963 (1963)
Catalyst
Honor the maggot,
supreme catalyst:
he spurs the rate of change:
(all scavengers are honorable: I love them
5all,
will scribble hard as I can for them)
he accelerates change
in the changeless continuum;
where the body falls completed, he sets to work:
10where the spirit attains
indifference
he makes his residence:
in the egg on wing from mound
to mound he travels,
15feeds, finds his wings,
after the wet-sweet of decay,
after the ant-sucked earth has drunk
the honey-fluids,
after
20the veins
lie dried to streaks of tendon
inside the meat-free, illuminated skull,
lofts, saws the air, copulates in a hung
rapture
25of riding, holds the sweet-clear
connection
through dual flights, male and female,
soil’s victory:
(dead cell dross transfigured
30into gloss,
iridescence of compound eyes,
duck-neck purple of hairy abdomen)
O worm supreme,
transformer of bloated, breaking flesh
35into colorless netted wings,
into the wills of sex and song, leaving
ash on odorless ground, the scent
of pinestraw
rising dominant from the striking sun!
1960 (1963)
Loss
When the sun
falls behind the sumac
thicket the
wild
5yellow daisies
in diffuse evening shade
lose their
rigorous attention
and
10half-wild with loss
turn
any way the wind does
and lift their
petals up
15to float
off their stems
and go
1964 (1964)
World
Breakers at high tide shoot
spray over the jetty boulders
that collects in shallow chips, depressions,
evening the surface to run-off lev
el:
5of these possible worlds of held water,
most can’t outlast the interim tideless
drought, so are clear, sterile, encased with
salt: one in particular, though, a hole,
providing depth with little surface,
10keeps water through the hottest day:
a slime of green algae extends into that
tiny sea, and animals tiny enough to be in a
world there breed and dart and breathe and
die: so we are here in this plant-created oxygen,
15drinking this sweet rain, consuming this green.
1963 (1964)
Butterflyweed
The butterfly that
named the weed
drank there, Monarch,
scrolled, medallioned—
5his wings lifted close
in pale underwing salute
occasionally would
with tense evenness
open down
10hinged coffers
lawned against the sun:
anchored in
dream, I could hardly
fall when earth
15dropped and looped away.
1963 (1964)
Configurations
1
when November stripped
the shrub,
what stood
out
5in revealed space was
a nest
hung
in essential limbs
2
how harmless truth
10is
in cold weather
to an empty nest
3
dry
leaves
15in
the
bowl,
like wings
4
summer turned light
20into darkness
and inside the shadeful
shrub
the secret
worked
25itself into life:
icicles and waterpanes:
recognitions:
at the bottom, knowledges
and desertions
5
30speech comes out,
a bleached form,
nestlike:
after the events of silence
the flying away
35of silence
into speech—
6
the nest is held
off-earth
by sticks;
40so, intelligence
stays
out of the ground
erect on a
brittle walk of bones:
45otherwise
the sea,
empty of separations
7
leaves
like wings
50in the Nov
ember nest:
wonder where the birds are now that were here:
wonder if the hawks missed them:
wonder if
55dry wings
lie abandoned,
bodiless
this
November:
60leaves—out of so many
a nestful missed the ground
8
I am a bush
I am a nest
I am a bird
65I am a wind
I am a negg
I is a bush, nest, bird, wind, negg
I is a leaf
if I fall what falls:
70the leaves fell and the birds flew away and winter came and
9
when
I
ambringing
singingthosehome
75,two again
summerbirds
comes
back
10
so what if
80lots of
unfathomable stuff
remains,
inconceivable distances,
closed and open infinities:
85so what if
all that, if
thunderstorms spill the eggs,
loosen the nest, strew it across
galaxies of grass and weeds:
90who cares what remains when
only the interior
immaterial
configuration—
shape—
95mattered, matters, immaterial, unremaining
11
there is some relationship between
proximity
to the earth and permanence:
a shrub puts itself into and out of
100the earth at once,
earth and air united by a stem’s
polar meshes of roots and branches:
earth
shrub
105nest
leaf
bird
the bird is somewhere south, unoriented
to these roots:
110the leaves
though they may not have wandered so far
are random:
earth
shrub
115nest
goodbye, nest, if wind lifts you loose
goodbye, shrub, if ice breaks you down
goodbye,
goodbye
12
120the shrub is nothing
except part of my song:
the bird I never saw is part of my song and
nothing else:
(the leaves are a great many little notes I lost
125when I was trying to make the song
that became my silence)
13
the cockbird longs for the henbird
which longs for the nest
which longs for the shrub which
130longs for the earth
which longs for the sun which longs for
14
inside there the woodmeat is saying
please, please
let me put on my leaves
135let me let the sap go
but the zero bark is saying
hush, hush
the time is not right
it’s not the right time
140the woodmeat is always right
but bark is knowing
1963
Glass
The song
sparrow puts all his
saying
into one
5repeated song:
what
variations, subtleties
he manages,
to encompass denser
10meanings, I’m
too coarse
to catch: it’s
one song, an over-reach
from which
15all possibilities,
like filaments,
depend:
killing,
nesting, dying,
20sun or cloud,
figure up
and become
song—simple, hard:
removed.
1963 (1964)
Morning Glory
Dew was
heavy
last night:
sun-up broke
5beads
into running
water: under
over
and
10against,
the mockingbird
fluffing
amorously
bathes
15in leaves
1963
The Strait
At the oracle
I found the
god
though active
5recalcitrant
unliteral as air:
the priestess
writhed
and moaned
10caught
in the anguish
of some
perishable
event:
15birds flew by:
the urns
hummed: the
columns
glazed with
20sun; on the
inside li
t wet with
fire: another, not
capable
of the inner
25speech,
read the priestess
and said,
“The
god wants honor,
30desires in you
honor’s attitude:
honor him and
your
venture will
35go well”:
cannot, I said,
the god be
more
specific? will
40I honor
him? come again
safe to this
grove?
the reader said,
45“The