by A. R. Ammons
time is allowed
in event’s instant:
away or
at home, universe and
20leaf try
to fall: occur.
1962 (1963)
High & Low
A mountain risen
in me
I said
this implacability
5must be met:
so I climbed
the peak:
height shook and
wind leaned
10I said what
kind of country is
this anyhow and
rubbled
down the slopes to
15small rock
and scattered weed.
1965
Peracute Lucidity
A perspicuity like a sanctuary: against
the pond a pavilion, led to by a glide
of stairs, set right and accurately
gauged: the bobolink in the dusk bush
5says a closing say-so: bunk
bunk the frog maintains and aims his
tilty eyes: just above the brookfall’s
shaggy seams and rags, clarity’s chapel
bodied by hung-in boughs: and
10widening out over the pond, the blown
cathedral luminous with evening glass:
I go out there and sit
till difference and event yield to
perfect composure: then the stars
15come out and question every sound, the brook’s.
1969
Increment
Applause is a shower
to the watertable of
self-regard:
in the downpour
5the watertable’s irrelevant
but after the shower passes
possibility takes on
an extensive millimeter.
1968
Bees Stopped
Bees stopped on the rock
and rubbed their headparts and wings
rested then flew on:
ants ran over the whitish greenish reddish
5plants that grow flat on rocks
and people never see
because nothing should grow on rocks:
I looked out over the lake
and beyond to the hills and trees
10and nothing was moving
so I looked closely
along the lakeside
under the old leaves of rushes
and around clumps of drygrass
15and life was everywhere
so I went on sometimes whistling
1951
Storm
Branches broken,
the clean meat at the branch knot
turned out white,
traveled by cleared
5white light: certain
consequences are
irreversible, arrangements
lost to
death’s and black’s
10scavenging the sweet grain:
well but weakness
went sacrificed to the wind
and the trees, clarified,
compress rootstrength
15into remaining flesh
and the leaves that shake
in the aftermath shake
in a safe, tested place.
1963
Two Possibilities
Coming out of the earth and going
into the earth compose
an interval or arc where
what to do’s
5difficult to fix: if it’s
the coming
out that answers, should one with all
thrust come out and
rise to imagination’s limit, leaving
10earthiness, maximally
to mark the change, much below:
if it’s
going in, should one flatten out on
coming, lie low
15among bush
and rock, and keep the residence
near the palm of the hand, the
gross engrossed and palpable:
well, there is an interval designed,
20apparently, for design.
1970
Medicine for Tight Spots
Consider big-city
tensions
rurally unwound,
high-tension lines that
5loft through the countryside,
give off
“wirelings”
and fine-up to houses
cool as a single volt:
10there are so many ways to approach the problems:
reproach:
best of all the by-pass and set-aside: the
intelligence has never been called for
because as usually
15manifested it’s
too formulated to swim
unformulable reality’s
fall-out insistences:
just think how woodsy roads
20shade spangled
wind up big-city printed circuits:
if the mind becomes what it sees or
makes how it works
I know which way I’m headed:
25won’t bushes bust us
mild:
won’t the streams
ravel us loose:
won’t we be untold
30by sweetwater tongues.
1969
Brooks & Other Notions
Currents figure
you can see them
they boil out
of themselves &
5slice in
from both
sides
a downward crease steady at
the moving burial:
10in the wind too
you can feel them
spell
themselves along the
arm, watch them
15against an elm
or
multiple on puddles:
below speech
mind
20figures motion,
plunges or takes
a turn: grief’s
a common
form of going:
25its letters rise &
spiel away expressly
inexact.
1969
Cougar
Deprived like the cougar
into heights
I knew huge
air, rock
5burn,
lightning, sun,
ice,
gained
insouciance:
10bend, bend
the stream called high:
but I climbed higher
knowing what
takes rock away.
1965 (1970)
This Black Rich Country
Dispossess me of belief:
between life and me obtrude
no symbolic forms:
grant me no mission: let my
5mystical talents be beasts
in dark trees: thin the wire
I limp in space, melt it
with quick heat, let me walk
or fall alone: fail
10me in all comforts:
hide renown behind the tomb:
withdraw beyond all reach of faith:
leave me this black rich country,
uncertainty, labor, fear: do not
15steal the rewards of my mortality.
1955 (1956)
Attention
Down by the bay I
kept in mind
at once
the tips of all the rushleaves
5and so
came to know
balance’s cost and true:
somewhere though in the whole field
is the one
10tip
I will someday lose out of mind
and fall through.
1963
Return
1
drought continuing
the stems
drop their leaves
healing hard the pul
vinal
5scars and
dangling buzzards
drop to sleeps
in ledge and
cactus shade, to rockheld
10reservoirs of night
and
sidewinder from the
stinging air
holds
15his tongue
2
I have come a long way
without arriving
torn songs up
from the roots of weeds
20but made no
silence sing:
climbed the peak but
found no foothold
higher than the ground
3
25should I roll
rocks
down the slope
to learn
the thunder of
30my being:
should I call out,
echolocation fixing me
against a certain wall:
should I break
35a switch
and whirling inscribe
a circle round me
to know my
center and periphery
4
40the leaves drop:
wolves thinning
like moons run through scuds of sage:
moon cloud shadows
sail gulfs
45through a wild terrain
1958
This Bright Day
Earth, earth!
day, this bright day
again—once more
showers of dry spruce gold,
5the poppy flopped broad open and delicate
from its pod—once more,
all this again: I’ve had many
days here with these stones and leaves:
like the sky, I’ve taken on a color
10and am still:
the grief of leaves,
summer worms, huge blackant
queens bulging
from weatherboarding, all that
15will pass
away from me that I will pass into,
none of the grief
cut less now than ever—only I
have learned the
20sky, the day sky, the blue
obliteration of radiance:
the night sky,
pregnant, lively,
tumultuous, vast—the grief
25again in a higher scale
of leaves and poppies:
space, space—
and a grief of things.
1967 (1969)
Look for My White Self
Find me diffuse, leached colorless,
gray as an inner image with no clothes
along the shallows of windrows: find
me wasted by hills,
5conversion mountain blue in sight
offering its ritual cone of white:
over the plain I came long years,
drawn by gaze: a flat land with
some broken stems, no gullies,
10sky matched square inch with
land in staying interchange: found
confusing hills, disconcerting names
and routes, differences locked
in seamless unities:
15so look for my white self, age clear,
time cleaned: there is the mountain:
even now my blue
ghost may be
singing on that height of snow.
1955 (1956)
Undersea
Foraminiferal millennia
bank and spill but
even so
time’s under pressure of
5diatomaceous event,
divisions a moment
arcs across:
desperate
for an umbrella, net, longpole,
10or fan: so much
to keep for paradigm,
so much to lose.
1967
Auto Mobile
For the bumps bangs & scratches of
collisive encounters
madam
I through time’s ruts and weeds
5sought you, metallic, your
stainless steel flivver:
I have banged you, bumped
and scratched, side-swiped,
momocked & begommed you &
10your little flivver still
works so well.
1967
Wagons
Going west
we finally hit
the sea hills, halted
& went down to
5see shells, touch
sand and surf, the
peculiar new conditions,
the anguish perfect
that the sun still
10took its gold away:
the waves harmless
unharmable posed
no shapes we could
wrestle to the ground:
15turning back like
going down ever
diminishes: we
decided maybe we
would hold but
20never turn back
and never go down.
1968 (1968)
September Drift
Hardly anything flies north these days
(a jay occasionally makes the bleak
decision): the robin, sitting on a high
dead elm limb, looks melancholy with
5leisure: he thinks, probably: I wonder
how or of what: small bark-searching
birds drift through the shrubs and trees,
the usual feeding, but in one direction:
I guess I won’t go anywhere myself, not
10that I don’t rustle somewhere deep
and remember ice and wolves: I’ll stay
to imagine everything can get back.
1968 (1970)
Civics
Hard up for better lays (with
fewer diseases)
a less qualified gliding,
he took
5amelioration seriously,
thought the poor deserved better
dreams, that
taxes should husband
unwed mothers, house
10the losing mad,
raised money for
churches
& otherwise by rising
and increasing
15spent himself so his old
eat-up woman got
little of his coin:
there are a number of possibilities.
1967
He Held Radical Light
He held radical light
as music in his skull: music
turned, as
over ridges immanences of evening light
5rise, turned
back over the furrows of his brain
into the dark, shuddered,
shot out again
in long swaying swirls of sound:
10reality had little weight in his transcendence
so he
had trouble keeping
his feet on the ground, was
terrified by that
15and liked himself, and others, mostly
under roofs:
nevertheless, when the
light churned and changed
his head to music, nothing could keep him
20off the mountains, his
head back, mouth working,
wrestling to say, to cut loose
from the high, unimaginable hook:
released, hidden from stars, he ate,
25burped, said he was like any one
of us: demanded he
was like any one of us.
1965 (1969)
Locus
Here
it is
the middle of April
(and a day or so more)
5and
the small oak
down in
the
hollow is
10lit up (winter-burned, ice-gold
leaves on)
a
t sundown,
ruin transfigured to
stillest shining:
15I let it as center
go
and
can’t believe
our peripheral
20speed.
1966
Circles
I can’t decide whether
the backyard stuff’s
central or irrelevant:
how matted rank the mint is! and
5some of the iris stalks are so
crooked rich
the blossoms can’t burst
(scant weeds
pop their flowers fast) loose
10and the pansies keep
jointing up another blooming tier:
I can’t figure out what
the whole green wish again
is, tips pushing hard into
15doing the same, last
year again, the year before:
something nearer than
the pleasure of
circles drives into the next
20moment and the next.
1968
Working Still
I can’t think of a thing to uphold:
the carborundum plant snows
sift-scum on the slick, outgoing river
and along the avenues car wheels
5float in a small powder: my made-up