by A. R. Ammons
here with these chances
70taken, here to take these chances: land winds will
rise, feed
back the sands, humble the breakers: today’s
high unrelenting cry will relent:
the waves will lap with broken, separate,
75quiet sounds:
let the thaw that will come, come: the dissolved
reorganizes
to resilience.
1963
Self-Portrait
In the desert a
clump of rocks
sang with hidden water:
I broke in &
5water spilled:
I planted trees:
wild animals from the hills
came at night
to tame water
10and stood still:
the air gathered
hoverings of birds
from
drought’s celestial trees:
15grass sprouted
and spangled into seed:
green reaches of
streams went out:
the rabbit that
20had visited,
dwelled:
this was a dream.
1964 (1966)
Passage
How, through what tube, mechanism,
unreal pass, does
the past get ahead of us
to become today?
5the dead are total mysteries, now:
their radiances,
unwaxed by flesh, are put out:
disintegrations
occur, the black kingdom separates, loses
10way, waters rush,
gravel pours—
faces loosen, turn, and move:
that fact, that edge to turn around!
senselessly, then,
15celebrant with obscure
causes, unimaginable means, trickles
of possibility, the cull beads
catch centers, round out,
luminescence stirs,
20circulates through dark’s depths
and there—all lost still lost—
the wells primed, the springs free,
tomorrow emerges and
falls back shaped into today.
1964 (1966)
Peak
Everything begins at the tip-end, the dying-out,
of mind:
the dazed eyes set and light
dissolves actual trees:
5the world beyond: tongueless,
unexampled
burns dimension out of shape,
opacity out of stone:
come: though the world ends and cannot
10end,
the apple falls sharp
to the heart starved with time.
1964 (1966)
Zone
I spent the day
differentiating
and wound up
with nothing
5whole to keep:
tree came apart from tree,
oak from maple, oak
from oak, leaf from leaf,
mesophyll cell
10from cell
and toward dark
I got lost between
cytoplasm’s grains
and vacuoles:
15the next day began
otherwise: tree
became plant, plant
and animal became
life: life & rock,
20matter: that
took up most of
the morning: after
noon, matter began
to pulse, shoot, to
25vanish in and out of
energy and
energy’s invisible
swirls confused, surpassed
me: from that edge
30I turned back,
strict with limitation,
to my world’s
bitter acorns
and sweet branch water.
1964 (1966)
Muse
From the dark
fragmentations
build me up
into a changed brilliant shape,
5realized order,
mind singing again
new song, moving into the slow beat and
disappearing beat
of perfect resonance:
10how many
times must I be broken and reassembled! anguish of becoming,
pain of moulting,
descent! before the unending moment of vision:
how much disorder must I learn to tolerate
15to find materials
for the new house of my sight!
arrange me
into disorder
near the breaking of the pattern
20but
should disorder start to
tear, the breaking down of possible return,
oh rise gleaming in recall,
sing me again towering remade, born into a wider
25order, structures deepening,
inching rootlike into the dark!
1959 (1965)
Sitting Down, Looking Up
A silver jet,
riding the top of tundra clouds,
comes over
maybe from Rio:
5the aluminum sun shines
on it
as if it were a natural creature.
1964 (1965)
Belief
for JFK
1
drums gather and humble us beyond escape,
propound the single, falling fact:
time, suspended between memory and present,
hangs unmeasured, empty
2
5erect,
disciplined by cadence into direction, the soldier
obeys the forms of rumor:
the riderless horse,
restive with the pressure of held flight,
10tosses the hung bit,
worries the soldier’s tameless arm—
sidling, prances the energy out
3
ahead, unalterable, the fact proceeds,
and the bit holds:
15the fire-needle bites,
training the head on course
4
the light, determined rattle
of the caisson
breaking into sunlight
20through the crystal black ribbons of trees!
the slack traces,
weightlessness at the shoulders of horses!
5
if we could break free
and run this knowledge out,
25burst this energy of grief
through a hundred countrysides!
if bleak through the black night
we could outrun
this knowledge into a different morning!
6
30belief, light as a drumrattle,
touches us and lifts us into tears
1964 (1964)
Song
Merging into place against a slope of trees,
I extended my arms and
took up the silence and spare leafage.
I lost my head first, the cervical meat
5clumping off in rot,
baring the spinal heart to wind and ice
which work fast.
The environment lost no self-possession.
In spring, termites with tickling feet
10aereated my veins.
A gall-nesting wren took my breath
flicking her wings, and
far into summer the termites found the heart.
No sign now shows the place,
15all these seasons since,
but a hump of sod below the leaves
where chipmunks dig.
Orientale
The pebble spoke and down
came the sun
its plume
brushing through space as
5over smooth sea-reaching stream
bent reed
lets sodden leaf
arrow-ripples cut
and acorn husk wind-whirled
10ran out and caught the sun
in its burred cup
and said Look
to everyone standing on
edge of fern leaf watching
15the other edge
become imaginary as
waterbirds low-flying through
islands snake-long dark offshore
Acorn husk got
20no attention and even
the universe could sundering
hold no ear
What somebody asked did
the pebble say
25and sea colander washed
aland said Nothing
nothing exists
and everybody watched to
see if fern leaf could
30re-appear with its lost edge
and when
snow fell went in
1958
Mays Landing
I sit in sun
light
on a white
yard-bench:
5the sparse great
oaks
cower the county
buildings:
a bumblebee
10works a head
of marigolds: the
jail back
there, keys rattle
a sheriff
15by:
people stand about
in twos and
threes talking,
waiting for
20court:
a drunk man
talks loud as
if sobering to
alarm:
25an acorn leaps
through leaves and
cracks the ground!
1963
Sphere
In the dark original water,
amniotic infinity
closed
boundless in circularity:
5tame, heavy
water,
equilibriant,
any will forming to become—
consistency of motion
10arising—
annihilated
by its equal and opposite:
an even, complete extent:
(there
15an eden: how
foreign and far away
your death, rivulets
trickling
through ripe bowels,
20return to heavy water,
infinite multiplicity, in
the deepening, filtering
earthen womb
that bears you forever
25beyond
the amnion, O barrier!)
A warm unity, separable but
entire,
you the nucleus
30possessing that universe.
1960 (1964)
First Carolina Said-Song
(as told me by an aunt)
In them days
they won’t hardly no way to know if
somebody way off
died
5till they’d be
dead and buried
and Uncle Jim
hitched up a team of mules to the wagon
and he cracked the whip over them
10and run them their dead-level best
the whole thirty miles to your great grandma’s funeral
down there in
Green Sea County
and there come up this
15awfulest rainstorm
you ever saw in your whole life
and your grandpa
was setting
in a goat-skin bottomed chair
20and them mules a-running
and him sloshing round in that chairful of water
till he got scalded
he said
and ev-
25ery
anch of skin come off his behind:
we got there just in time to see her buried
in an oak grove up
back of the field:
30it’s growed over with soapbushes and huckleberries now.
1962 (1965)
Second Carolina Said-Song
(as told me by a patient, Ward 3-B,
Veterans Hospital, Fayetteville, August 1962)
I was walking down by the old
Santee
River
one evening, foredark
5fishing I reckon,
when I come on this
swarm of
bees
lit in the fork of a beech limb
10and they werz
jest a swarming:
it was too late to go home
and too far
and brang a bee-gum
15so I waited around
till the sun went
down,
most dark,
and cut me off a pinebough,
20dipped it in the river
and sprankled water
on’em: settled’em right down,
good and solid,
about
25a bushel of
them:
when it got dark I first cut off
the fork branches and
then cut about four foot back toward
30the trunk
and I
throwed the limb over my shoulder and
carried’em home.
1962 (1965)
Discoverer
If you must leave the shores of mind,
scramble down the walls
of dome-locked underwater caves
into the breathless, held
5clarity of dark, where no waves break,
a grainy, colloidal grist
and quiet, carry a light: carry A = πr2,
carry Kepler’s equal areas in
equal times: as air line take Baudelaire’s
10L’Albatros: as depth markers
to call you back, fix the words of
the golden rule: feed the
night of your seeking with clusters
of ancient light:
15remember the sacred sheaf, the rods of
civilization, the holy
bundle of elements: if to cast light
you must enter diffusion’s ruin,
carry with you light to cast, to
20gather darkness by: carry A is to B
as A plus B is to A: if to gather darkness
into light, evil into good,
you must leave the shores of mind,
remember us, return and rediscover us.
1962 (1965)
A Symmetry of Thought
is a mental object:
is to spirit
a rock of individual shape,
a flowerbed, pylon,
5an arbor vitae
to cerebral loam:
is a moon in the mind,
water and land divided,
a crystal, precipitate,
10separation, refinement,
a victory of being over void,
hazardous commitment,
broken eternity,
limited virtue;
15coming into matter
spirit fallen
trades eternity
for temporal form:
is a symmetry of motion,
20can always find its way
back to oblivion,
must move accommodating,
useful, relevant:
is, dead, a perfection;
25here is its cage
to contemplate; here
time stops
and all its hollow bells
struck loud are
30silenced in the never-ending sound.
1958 (1959)
Holding On
The stone in my tread
sings by the strip of woods
but is
unheard by open fields:
5surround me then with walls
before I risk
the outer sight, as, walled,
I’ll soon long to.
1963 (1964)
Uh, Philosophy
I understand
reading the modern philosophers
that truth is so much a method
it’s perfectly all
5right for me to believe whatever
I like or if I like,
nothing:
I do not know that I care to be set that free:
I am they say
10at liberty to be
provisional, to operate
expediently, do not have to commit myself
to imperturbables, outright
legislations, hardfast rules:
15they say I can
prefer my truths,
whatever
suits my blood,
blends with my proclivities, my temperament:
20I suppose they mean I’ve had more experience than I can