The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1

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