by A. R. Ammons
20or overthrust into very recent times:
there waterlike stone, those heated seekings &
goings, cools to exact concentration, I
mean the telling’s unmediated:
the present allows the reading of much
25old material: but none of it need be read:
it says itself (and
said itself) so to speak perfectly in itself.
1969 (1970)
The Unifying Principle
Ramshackles, archipelagoes, loose constellations
are less fierce, subsidiary centers, with the
attenuations of interstices, roughing the salience,
jarring the outbreak of too insistent commonalty:
5a board, for example, not surrendering the rectitude
of its corners, the island of the oaks an
admonishment to pines, underfigurings (as of the Bear)
that take identity on: this motion is against
the grinding oneness of seas, hallows distinction
10into the specific: but less lovely, too, for how
is the mass to be amassed, by what sanction
neighbor touch neighbor, island bear resemblance,
how are distinction’s hard lines to be dissolved
(and preserved): what may all the people turn to,
15the old letters, the shaped, characteristic peak
generations of minds have deflected and kept:
a particular tread that sometimes unweaves, taking
more shape on, into dance: much must be
tolerated as out of timbre, out of step, as being not
20in its time or mood (the hiatus of the unconcerned)
and much room provided for the wretched to find caves
to ponder way off in: what then can lift the people
and only when they choose to rise or what can make
them want to rise, though business prevents: the
25unifying principle will be a
phrase shared, an old cedar long known, general
wind-shapes in a usual sand: those objects single,
single enough to be uninterfering, multiple by
the piling on of shared sight, touch, saying:
30when it’s found the people live the small wraths of ease.
1969 (1970)
Runoff
By the highway the stream downslope
could hardly clear itself
through rubbish and slime but by
that resistance gained a cutting
5depth equal to its breadth
and so had means to muscle into
ripples and spill over angled
shelves:
and so went on down in a long
10curve, responsively slow to the
sizable ridge it
tended
and farther on down, quiet and clear,
never tipping enough to break sound,
15slowed into marshy landrise and burst
into a bog of lupine and mirrored:
that was a place! what a place!
the soggy small marsh, nutgrass and swordweed!
1969 (1970)
Transaction
I attended the burial of all my rosy feelings:
I performed the rites, simple and decisive:
the long box took the spilling of gray ground in
with little evidence of note: I traded slow
5work for the usual grief: the services were private:
there was little cause for show, though no cause not
to show: it went indifferently, with an appropriate
gravity and lack of noise: the ceremonies of the self
seem always to occur at a distance from the ruins of men
10where there is nothing really much to expect, no arms,
no embraces: the day was all right: certain occasions
outweigh the weather: the woods just to the left
were average woods: well, I turned around finally from
the process, the surface smoothed into a kind of seal,
15and tried to notice what might be thought to remain:
everything was there, the sun, the breeze, the woods
(as I said), the little mound of troublesome tufts of
grass: but the trees were upright shadows, the breeze
was as against a shade, the woods stirred gray
20as deep water: I looked around for what was left,
the tools, and took them up and went away, leaving
all my treasures where they might never again disturb
me, increase or craze: decision quietens:
shadows are bodiless shapes, yet they have a song.
1969 (1970)
Then One
When the circumstance takes
on a salience, as a
crushing pressure, then one,
addled by the possible closures,
5the tangles that might
snap taut in a loop
or other unfigurable construct,
then one
pores on drift-logs far at sea
10where room can wear drifts out
winds change
and few places show one can’t
embark
from and then one thinks finally
15with tight appreciation
of nothingness
or if not that far of
things that loosen or come apart.
1969 (1970)
Further On
Up this high and far north
it’s shale and woodsless snow:
small willows and alder brush
mark out melt streams on the
5opposite slope and the wind talks
as much as it can before freeze
takes the gleeful, glimmering
tongues away: whips and sticks
will scream and screech then
10all winter over the deaf heights,
the wind lifting its saying out
to the essential yell of the
lost and gone: it’s summer now:
elk graze the high meadows:
15marshgrass heads high as a moose’s
ears: lichen, a wintery weed,
fills out for the brittle sleep:
waterbirds plunder the shallows.
1969 (1970)
Hope’s Okay
The undergrowth’s a conveyance of butterflies
(flusters of clustering) so buoyant and delightful,
filling into a floating impression, diversity’s
diversion breaking out into under-piny seas
5point by point to the mind’s nodes and needs:
let’s see, though, said the fire through the undergrowth,
what all this makes into, what difference can
survive it: so I waded through the puffy disgust
and could not help feeling despair of
10many a gray, smoke-worming twig, scaly as if alive:
much that was here I said is lost and if I stoop
to ask bright thoughts of roots
do not think I ask for better than was here
or that hope with me rises one leaf higher than
15the former growth (higher to an ashless fire) or
that despair came any closer than ash to being total.
1969 (1969)
Life in the Boondocks
Untouched grandeur in the hinterlands:
large-lobed ladies laughing in brook
water, a clear, scrubbed ruddiness lofted
to cones and conifers: frost blurs
5the morning elk there and squirrels
chitter with the dawn, numb seed: clarity,
the eagle dips into scary nothingness,
off a bluff over canyon heights: trout
plunder their way up, thrashing the shallows
10white: ladies come out in the gold-true sun
and loll easy as white boulders
in the immediate radiance by wind-chilling
streams: I have been there so
often, so often and held the women, squeezed,
15tickled, nuzzled their rose-paint luxury:
so many afternoons listened to the rocky
drone of bees over spring-water weed-bloom,
snow-water violets, and distant moss turf.
1969 (1970)
Spiel
I feel sure you will be pleased
with our product: it is
a coil spring comes wintrily into
as house plants
5react first to the longer light:
but begin all
enterprise with celebration: measures
on the sand by
fluttering rush, sail, heart spun in
10a resonance between
departure, grief and adventure of
change, the hurry and detail,
sudden calamity
of shoving off, moorless into a hunk of
15time that may
round back to greet its other edge:
may:
(nothing is so phony as an incomplete
obscurity—it needs spelling
20into its deepest outing,
surrounding into its biggest bulging:
when it gets aglitter
it grows black: what to make of a
hinted thing
25where the mind’s not traveled
but a botch: but spelled out any
spiel can pick enough surfage up
to drum a sea loose)
I just ate a green banana: it is in
30me now mushed and gushy: there is
nothing small enough to conjure clarity with:
take the bathroom spider wintered thin:
so thin
bleached out against walls
35life seems in him a brown taint that
lacking might make him water or crisp:
he spun an open-ended house
(safety, closed up to perfection,
traps, he knows)
40in the ceilingwall sharp
angle:
(well then I will take a mere
suasion!
a drift
45as of earth into light, the chorus
dancing to the right,
left, a multimedial parlance:
well I will take just the angle
the waves come out of the sea, say,
50the way they break down their length
in a continuous moving roar:
I don’t care how many drops of
water there are
or how totally they are water or how
55the ocean is nothing (figuratively
speaking) else: I identify waves,
they have an
action, many actions: I’ve seen them
come straight in, crest first in
60the middle, break outward both ways
and leave behind
a pyramid of foam: I’ve never
seen a drop of water do that:)
at night he rides down to the white
65sink
and hums in a drop of water’s
uptight edge: I try to think
of what he eats
so winter skinny, such a bugless
70winter: maybe those tiny book lice
leave learning
scoot ceilings sometimes and suffer
the usual
confrontation with reality:
75or I think dandruff scales soaked in
droplets
drift dripping proteins loose that
drunk skirl spiders into hallelujahs
of darkening:
80from the state of distress a pill can
remove you: meanwhile the blue
spruce
is perilously unaffected:
it’s monsterless here:
85the
bayberry in a green sweep, breeze
lively:
indifferent as lace:
swipes, swatches, smears, luminous
90samplers: what is
the existence in the argument of what
the argument
is about: precise but unspecified,
hunted out, turned from, disguised,
95brunted:
order, strict,
is the shadow of flight:
I mean because of the lusterless
structure
100the wing has rein: fact
is the port of
extreme navigation:
where footprints
disappear at the edge of melting snow
105hesitation breaks mindfully into itself:
the fairgrounds
(hill meadows, aslant
triangular sweepclosings of heights,
scrub fringes, yangs of woods,
110lovely sumac and sassafras, golden
clumps of grass
rising to a wind line, commas,
the pheasant’s tail, long,
perfect for disappearance in
115winter weeds, clumpy printwork
of rabbits
over hedge-kept floats of snow . . .
I don’t know what all there is
but there’s more than plenty and
120that’s just it there’s too much
except for, there’d be too much
except for the outgrowth of soothing
hills)
sporting goods
125nip and tuck
scoops
scopes
scrimps &
scroungings
(1970)
Guitar Recitativos
1
I know you love me, baby
I know it by the way you carry on around here certain times of the day & night
I can make the distinction between the willing and the unrefusable
That’s not what I’m talking about
5That’s not what I need
What I mean is could you just peel me a few of those grapes over there
I want to lie here cool and accumulate . . .
Oh about half a bunch
That’s what I need
10—flick out those little seed—
Just drop’em in here one at a time
I’m not going anyplace, baby, not today
Relax—sneak the skin off a few of those grapes for me, will you?
2
Baby, you been stomping round on my toes so long
15They breaking out in black and blue hyacinths,
Well-knit forget-me-nots
Geraniums are flopping out over the tops of my shoes
tendril leaves coming out along the edges of my shoelaces
Gladioli are steering out of the small of my back
20strumming their cool stalks up my spine
Zinnias radiating from the crock of my neck
and petunias swinging down bells from my earlobes
All this stomping around on me you been doing, baby,
I’m gonna break out in a colorful reaction
25I’m gonna wade right through you
with the thorns of all these big red roses
3
I can tell you what I think of your beauty, baby,
You have it, it’s keen and fast, there’s this
glittery sword whipping about your head all day
30and, baby, you make people snap—you condescend
and a surprised little heart splatters or you turn your
cold head away and a tiny freeze kills a few
cells in some man’s brain—I mean, baby, you
may be kind but your beauty sweetie is such
35many a man would run himself through for
hating your guts every minute that he died for you
4
I’m tired of the you-and-me thing
I am for more research into the nature of the amorous bond
the discovery of catalysts for speeding-up, wearing out, and getting it over
&
nbsp; with
40or for slowing it down to allow long intervals of looseness
Baby, there are times when the mixture becomes immiscible
and other times we get so stirred up I can’t tell
whether I’m you or me
and then I have this fear of a surprising reaction in which
45we both turn into something else
powdery or gaseous or slightly metallic
What I mean is this whole relationship is, lacking further
knowledge, risky: while there’s still time, why
don’t you get yourself together and I’ll
50get myself together and then we’ll sort of shy out
of each other’s gravitational field, unstring the
electromagnetism and then sort of just drop this
whole orientation baby
5
You come in and I turn on:
55freon purrs and the
refrigerator breaks out with hives of ice
The Westinghouse portable electric fan flushes
my papers all over the room
The waffle-iron whacks down sizzling imaginary waffles