by A. R. Ammons
60One paper glues itself and billows to the back of the fan
my nerves nervous as newspapers
I tell you you are a walking calamity
And when you sit down there is hardly less activity
The alarm clock breaks out raging its held cry
65and the oven in the kitchen sets itself for broil
I mean the gas-jet in the incinerator bloops on
and frankly the mechanisms in my legs—I hope you
never find out—jerk:
Oh, beauty, beauty is so disturbingly nice.
1967 (1968)
Laser
An image comes
and the mind’s light, confused
as that on surf
or ocean shelves,
5gathers up,
parallelizes, focuses
and in a rigid beam illuminates the image:
the head seeks in itself
fragments of left-over light
10to cast a new
direction,
any direction,
to strike and fix
a random, contradicting image:
15but any found image falls
back to darkness or
the lesser beams splinter and
go out:
the mind tries to
20dream of diversity, of mountain
rapids shattered with sound and light,
of wind fracturing brush or
bursting out of order against a mountain
range: but the focused beam
25folds all energy in:
the image glares filling all space:
the head falls and
hangs and cannot wake itself.
1964 (1967)
Virtu
Make a motion
the wind said and
the mountain
strained hard
5but
couldn’t
even quiver:
so the wind curved and shook the poplars:
a slope
10pebble loosened
and struck
down sharp goings:
the mountain
stunned at being
15moved nearly
broke with grief
and the wind
whirled up the valley
over the stream
20and trees
utterly unlost
in emptiness.
1965 (1967)
Choice
Idling through the mean space dozing,
blurred by indirection, I came upon a
stairwell and steadied a moment to
think against the stem:
5upward turned golden steps
and downward dark steps entered the dark:
unused to other than even ground I
spurned the airless heights though bright
and the rigor to lift an immaterial soul
10and sank
sliding in a smooth rail whirl and fell
asleep in the inundating dark
but waking said god abhors me
but went on down obeying at least
15the universal law of gravity:
millenniums later waking in a lightened air
I shivered in high purity
and still descending grappled with
the god that
20rolls up circles of our linear
sight in crippling disciplines
tighter than any climb.
1955
Body Politic
Out for stars he
took some
down
and we all
5wondered if he might be
damned to such sinister
& successful enterprise:
we took and
unfolded him: he
10turned out
pliant and warm
& messy in
some minor way: then, not
having come to
15much, we
lit into his stars which
declaring nothing dark
held white and high
and brought us down.
1967 (1967)
Apologia pro Vita Sua
I started picking up the stones
throwing them into one place
and by sunrise I was going far away
for the large ones
5always turning to see never lost
the cairn’s height
lengthening my radial reach:
the sun watched with deep concentration
and the heap through the hours grew
10and became by nightfall
distinguishable from all the miles around
of slate and sand:
during the night the wind falling
turned earthward its lofty freedom and speed
15and the sharp blistering sound muffled
toward dawn and the blanket was
drawn up over a breathless face:
even so you can see in full dawn
the ground there lifts
20a foreign thing desertless in origin.
1956 (1958)
Offset
Losing information he
rose gaining
view
till at total
5loss gain was
extreme:
extreme & invisible:
the eye
seeing nothing
10lost its
separation:
self-song
(that is a mere motion)
fanned out
15into failing swirls
slowed &
became continuum.
1967 (1969)
Mountain Talk
I was going along a dusty highroad
when the mountain
across the way
turned me to its silence:
5oh I said how come
I don’t know your
massive symmetry and rest:
nevertheless, said the mountain,
would you want
10to be
lodged here with
a changeless prospect, risen
to an unalterable view:
so I went on
15counting my numberless fingers.
1964 (1970)
Impulse
If a rock on the slope
loosens tonight
will it be because
rain’s
5unearthed another grain
or a root
arched for room
and
will a tree or rock
10be right
there, or two rocks or trees,
to hold the
flashed decision back?
(1969)
Needs
I want something suited to my special needs
I want chrome hubcaps, pin-on attachments
and year round use year after year
I want a workhorse with smooth uniform cut,
5dozer blade and snow blade & deluxe steering
wheel
I want something to mow, throw snow, tow, and sow with
I want precision reel blades
I want a console-styled dashboard
10I want an easy spintype recoil starter
I want combination bevel and spur gears, 14
gauge stamped steel housing and
washable foam element air cleaner
I want a pivoting front axle and extrawide turf tires
15I want an inch of foam rubber inside a vinyl
covering
and especially if it’s not too much, if I
can deserve it, even if I can’t pay for it
I want to mow while riding.
1968 (1968)
Help
From the inlet
surf a father
pulls in a crab—
a wonderful machinery
5but
not a fish: kicks
it off the line &
/>
up the beach
where three daughters
10and two sons take
turns bringing cups
of water
to keep alive, to
watch work, the sanded
15& disjeweled.
1968 (1969)
Love Song
Like the hills under dusk you
fall away from the light:
you deepen: the green
light darkens
5and you are nearly lost:
only so much light as
stars keep
manifests your face:
the total night in
10myself raves
for the light along your lips.
1966 (1967)
Love Song (2)
Rings of birch bark
stand in the woods
still circling the nearly
vanished log: after
5we go to pass
through log and star
this white song will
hug us together in the
woods of some lover’s head.
1966 (1967)
Mule Song
Silver will lie where she lies
sun-out, whatever turning the world does,
longeared in her ashen, earless,
floating world:
5indifferent to sores and greenage colic,
where oats need not
come to,
bleached by crystals of her trembling time:
beyond all brunt of seasons, blind
10forever to all blinds,
inhabited by
brooks still she may wraith over broken
fields after winter
or roll in the rye-green fields:
15old mule, no defense but a mule’s against
disease, large-ribbed,
flat-toothed, sold to a stranger, shot by a
stranger’s hand,
not my hand she nuzzled the seasoning-salt from.
1958 (1969)
Script
The blackbird takes out
from the thicket down there
uphill toward
the house, shoots
5through a vacancy in the
elm tree & bolts
over the house:
some circling leaves waving
record
10size, direction, and speed.
1968 (1969)
Holly
The hollybush flowers
small whites (become of
course berries)
four tiny petals
5turned
back and four
anthers stuck out:
the pistil low &
honey-high:
10wasp-bees (those small
wasps or
bees) come around
with a glee too
fine to hear: when
15the wind dies
at dusk, silence,
unaffronted,
puts a robe
slightly thinner
20than sight over
all the flowers
so darkness &
the terrible stars
will not hurt them.
1968 (1968)
Small Song
The reeds give
way to the
wind and give
the wind away
(1969)
Possibility Along a Line of Difference
At the crustal
discontinuity
I went down and
walked
5on the gravel bottom,
head below gully rims
tufted with
clumpgrass and
through-free roots:
10prairie flatness crazed
by that difference,
I grew
excited with
the stream’s image left
15in dust
and farther down
in confined rambling
I
found a puddle
20green, iridescent
with a visitation of daub-singing wasps,
sat down and watched
tilted shadow untilting
fill the trough,
25imagined cloudbursts
and
scattered pillars of rain,
buffalo at night routed
by lightning,
30leaping,
falling back,
wobble-kneed calves
tumbling, gully-caught;
coyote, crisp-footed
35on the gravel,
loping up the difference.
1959 (1969)
Cascadilla Falls
I went down by Cascadilla
Falls this
evening, the
stream below the falls,
5and picked up a
handsized stone
kidney-shaped, testicular, and
thought all its motions into it,
the 800 mph earth spin,
10the 190-million-mile yearly
displacement around the sun,
the overriding
grand
haul
15of the galaxy with the 30,000
mph of where
the sun’s going:
thought all the interweaving
motions
20into myself: dropped
the stone to dead rest:
the stream from other motions
broke
rushing over it:
25shelterless,
I turned
to the sky and stood still:
Oh
I do
30not know where I am going
that I can live my life
by this single creek.
1966 (1969)
Summer Session
Saliences are humming bee paths
in & out around
here, continuous if
unpredictable: they
5hang the air with cotton
candy
and make a neighborhood:
we set out four tomato plants a while
ago: good soil
10where a row of winter-used cut wood was:
I’ve been out several times to see
but coming dark hinders me,
forcing faith up which
must
15spindly as high walloping
weeds
outlast the night:
earlier came a shower so
skinny
20not a coil spring in the glass pond
rang the periphery, for a minute:
walking home from class:
dogs yurping
out from hedge tunnels,
25jerking to snazzy, skidding halts,
an outrage about the legs,
hairy explosion with
central, floating teeth:
I hope snitching hairy little
30worms
will thread their eyelids and distending close off
the eyeballs of flagrant sight the way
summer closed up the
hedges to fill
35us with surprises:
in my yard’s more wordage than I
can read:
the jaybird gives a shit:
the earthworm hoe-split bleeds
40against a damp black clump:
the problem is
how
to keep shape and flow:
the day’s died
45& can’t be re-made:
in the dusk I can’t recover
the goldenbodied fly
that waited on a sunfield leaf:
well I can’t recover the light:
50in my head—on the
inside frontal wall—the fly waits
and then, as he did, darts upward at an
air-hung companion:
ghosts remain, essences out-skinnying
55light: essences
perceiving ghosts ski
nny skinny
percipients:
reverence, which one cannot
withhold, is
60laid on lightly, with terror—as if
one were holding a dandelion back
into the sun:
all these shapes my bones
answer to
65are going to go on
consuming, the flowers, venations, vines,
the roots that know their
way,
going to go on taking down and
70re-designing, are going to go on
stridently
with bunchers & shears
devouring sundry mud, flesh: but their
own shapes will, as will all shapes, break
75but will with all
others
cast design ahead where possible, hold
figuration in the cast seed:
shape & flow:
80we must not feel hostile:
the most perfect nothingness affords
the widest play,
the most perfect meaninglessness:
look up at dusk and see
85the bead fuzzy-buzzy bug
no darker than mist:
couldn’t get along
at all except against infinity:
swallow, bat dine
90in a rush—
never know what hit him
nothing hit him sent him to nothing:
but the temporary marvels!—
getting along against. . . .
95take it from there:
(to slink and dream with the interior singing
attention of snakes)
prolix as a dream, a stream, sameness
of going
100but diverse, colorful, sunlit