by A. R. Ammons
ever read about, taking in
as I do
possibly a hundred sensations per second, conscious
and unconscious,
25and making a vegetal at least
synthesis
from them all, so that
philosophy is
a pry-pole, materialization,
30useful as a snowshovel when it snows;
something solid to knock people down with
or back people up with:
I do not know that I care to be backed up in just that way:
the philosophy gives clubs to
35everyone, and I prefer disarmament:
that is, I would rather relate
to the imperturbable objective
than be the agent of
“possibly unsatisfactory eventualities”:
40isn’t anything plain true:
if I had something
to conform to (without responsibility)
I wouldn’t feel so hot and sticky:
(but I must be moved by what I am moved by):
45they do say, though, I must give some force to facts,
must bend that way enough,
be in on the gist of “concrete observations,”
must be pliant to the drift (roll with the knocks):
they say, too, I must halter my fancy
50mare
with these blinding limitations:
I don’t know that I can go along with that, either:
for though I’ve proved myself stupid by 33 years
of getting nowhere,
55I must nevertheless be given credit for the sense wherewith
I decided never to set out:
what are facts if I can’t line them up
any way I please
and have the freedom
I refused I think in the beginning?
1959 (1963)
The Numbers
are
consecutive:
everything is real: no use
to worry: everything comes after everything,
5safely held in count:
experience, yes:
remember that:
selective memory: but the whole is difficult to
recall, day by day:
10certain things are so clear:
think of the numbers, they proceed: there are five sparrows
at the feeder:
two are on the ground:
one is descending:
15of those three on the ground
one is looking off,
toward or through the hedge, considering:
nevertheless, the count
is perfect:
20942:
do not
worry that anything
is going to go wrong,
please:
25turn to page 5: count two pages farther: count two pages
farther: count two pages farther:
where we are:
there is no use to worry:
grab the addendum:
30today when the leaves fell it was
brilliant: shadows counted every one:
shadows broke against the limbs,
swept with several degrees of intensity across the grass,
moving
35not as
the leaves
moved:
that was exciting:
the angles of descent (tho there is no use to worry) were not
40predictable,
having to do with wind velocities and turns of leaf:
please turn to page 6:
all is explicable:
here are the boxes: 4×4×4×4×4×4×4×4:
45how many? how many?
how many? how many?
many:
the numbers can set you free: square a pear:
pare a pair:
50peel a peer:
a peer? appear
and seem:
be confident;
as you turn the numbers
55veracity
links segment to segment: a sausage bliss!
there is no reason:
for concern:
falls wear the rock away
60by a volume of noise: add it up:
think, think of the numbers, how they move!
appear and seem:
the industrial buildings
are as a shed of apples
65a truck has crushed through: musiked with
bees!
there is no cause:
for concern: spell the numbers: gather them: the numbers
are consecutive:
1964
Empty
Prison break!
the single-idea bolt shot back!
the grillwork
of syllogism
5lake loose!
the unyielding walls, square,
sharp-cornered,
fallen flat out
to total openness!
10certain isolations:
the diminished moon over cold
sea:
introduction of rocks
and shrubs—the
15multiform land:
guilt diffused in limitless air:
punishment
glittered dim among turning deep-sea schools:
the unknown—pointless, vacant, blunt:
20emptiness!
say everything again:
say everything over:
cluck the words out of configuration,
into configuration:
25remake:
ramble:
nothing has been established:
the forms have not been placed:
the mixers are not ready:
30the man will hear no answer:
he is not listening:
his heart knows shapeless music:
he is turned loose:
the prison is broken
1964
Unbroken
Evening falls: earth
divides:
insects waken
as
5birds fly to roost:
out there, nothing
happens:
everything is
the
10same.
1963 (1965)
Fall
Summer gauds,
crickets
sing:
the cool-snap
5quavers their song
beyond
meanings they intend.
(1964)
The Wind Coming Down From
summit and blue air
said I am sorry for you
and lifting past
said you
5are mere dust which I
as you see control
yet nevertheless are
instrument of miracle
and rose
10out of earshot but
returning in a slow loop
said while
I am always just this bunch of
compensating laws
15pushed, pushing
not air or motion
but the motion of air
I coughed
and the wind said
20Ezra will live
to see your last
sun come up again
I turned (as I will) to weeds and
the wind went off
25carving
monuments through a field of stone
monuments whose shape
wind cannot arrest but
taking hold on
30changes
while Ezra
listens from terraces of mind
wind cannot reach or
weedroots of my low-feeding shiver
1958 (1959)
Interval
Coming to a pinywoods
where a stream darted across the path
like a squirrel or frightened blacksnake
I sat down on a sunny hillock
5and leaned back against a pine
/>
and picked up some dry pineneedle bundles from the ground
and tore each bundle apart a needle at a time
It was not Coulter’s pine
for coulteri is funnier looking
10and not Monterey either
and I thought God must have had Linnaeus in mind
orders of trees correspond so well between them
and I dropped to sleep wondering what design God
had meant the human mind to fit
15and looked up and saw a great bird
warming in the sun high on a pine limb
tearing from his breast golden feathers
softer than new gold that
dropped to the wind one or two
20gently and touched my face
I picked one up and it said
The world is bright after rain
for rain washes death out of the land and hides it far
beneath the soil and it returns again cleansed with life
25and so all is a circle
and nothing is separable
Look at this noble pine from which you are
almost indistinguishable it is also sensible
and cries out when it is felled
30and so I said are trees blind and is the earth black to them
Oh if trees are blind
I do not want to be a tree
A wind rising of one in time blowing the feather away
forsaken I woke
35and the golden bird had flown away and the sun
had moved the shadows over me so I rose and walked on
(1957)
Way to Go
West light flat on trees:
bird flying
deep out in blue glass:
uncertain wind
5stirring the leaves: this is
the world we have:
take it
1963 (1965)
UPLANDS (1970)
for Mona and Vida
Snow Log
Especially the fallen tree
the snow picks
out in the woods to show:
the snow means nothing by that,
5no special emphasis: actually
snow picks nothing out:
but was it a failure, is it,
snow’s responsible for
that the brittle upright black
10shrubs and small trees
set off what caught the snow
in special light:
or there’s some intention
behind the snow snow’s too shallow
15to reckon with: I take it on myself:
especially the fallen tree
the snow picks
out in the woods to show.
1969 (1970)
Upland
Certain presuppositions are altered
by height: the inversion to
sky-well a peak
in a desert makes: the welling
5from clouds down the boulder fountains:
it is always a
surprise out west there—
the blue ranges loose and aglide
with heat and then come close
10on slopes leaning up into green:
a number of other phenomena might
be summoned—
take the Alleghenies for example,
some quality in the air
15of summit stones lying free and loose
out among the shrub trees: every
exigency seems prepared for that might
roll, bound, or give flight
to stone: that is, the stones are
20prepared: they are round and ready.
1969 (1969)
Periphery
One day I complained about the periphery
that it was thickets hard to get around in
or get around for
an older man: it’s like keeping charts
5of symptoms, every reality a symptom
where the ailment’s not nailed down:
much knowledge, precise enough,
but so multiple it says this man is alive
or isn’t: it’s like all of a body answering
10all of pharmacopoeia, a too
adequate relationship:
so I complained and said maybe I’d brush
deeper and see what was pushing all this
periphery, so difficult to make any sense
15out of, out:
with me, decision brings its own
hesitation: a symptom, no doubt, but open
and meaningless enough without paradigm:
but hesitation
20can be all right, too: I came on a spruce
thicket full of elk, gushy snow-weed,
nine species of lichen, four pure white
rocks and
several swatches of verbena near bloom.
1969 (1969)
Clarity
After the event the rockslide
realized,
in a still diversity of completion,
grain and fissure,
5declivity
&
force of upheaval,
whether rain slippage,
ice crawl, root
10explosion or
stream erosive undercut:
well I said it is a pity:
one swath of sight will never
be the same: nonetheless,
15this
shambles has
relieved a bind, a taut of twist,
revealing streaks &
scores of knowledge
20now obvious and quiet.
1969 (1970)
Classic
I sat by a stream in a
perfect—except for willows—
emptiness
and the mountain that
5was around,
scraggly with brush &
rock
said
I see you’re scribbling again:
10accustomed to mountains,
their cumbersome intrusions,
I said
well, yes, but in a fashion very
like the water here
15uncapturable and vanishing:
but that
said the mountain does not
excuse the stance
or diction
20and next if you’re not careful
you’ll be
arriving at ways
water survives its motions.
1969 (1969)
Conserving the Magnitude of Uselessness
Spits of glitter in lowgrade ore,
precious stones too poorly surrounded for harvest,
to all things not worth the work
of having,
5brush oak on a sharp slope, for example,
the balk tonnage of woods-lodged boulders,
the irreparable desert,
drowned river mouths, lost shores where
the winged and light-footed go,
10take creosote bush that possesses
ground nothing else will have,
to all things and for all things
crusty or billowy with indifference,
for example, incalculable, irremovable water
15or fluvio-glacial deposits
larch or dwarf aspen in the least breeze sometimes shiver in—
suddenly the salvation of waste betides,
the peerlessly unsettled seas that shape the continents,
take the gales wasting and in waste over
20Antarctica and the sundry high shoals of ice,
for the inexcusable (the worthless abundant) the
merely tiresome, the obviously unimprovable,
to these and for these and for their undiminishment
the poets will yelp and hoot forever
25probably,
rank as weeds themselves and just as abandoned:
nothing useful is of lasting value:
dry wind only is still talking among the oldest stones.<
br />
1969 (1970)
If Anything Will Level with You Water Will
Streams shed out of mountains in a white rust
(such the abomination of height)
slow then into upland basins or high marsh
and slowing drop loose composed figurations
5on big river bottoms
or give the first upward turn from plains:
that’s for modern streams: if sediment’s
lithified it
may have to be considered ancient, the result of
10a pressing, perhaps lengthy, induration:
old streams from which the water’s
vanished are interesting, I mean that
kind of tale,
water, like spirit, jostling hard stuff around
15to make speech into one of its realest expressions:
water certainly is interesting (as is spirit) and
small rock, a glacial silt, just as much so:
but most pleasurable (magma & migma) is
rock itself in a bound slurp or spill