by A. R. Ammons
the events a stick makes
coming down a
brook
20scraping the bottom
of the ledge-smooth spill—such
events exist in memory
& possibility as in
a silver radiance: the salience,
25in a bodiless arrogance,
must preserve
algal tracings or it
loses further (already scared of loss)
ground for possible self-imaginings:
30interwork, interwork, it’s interwork
that pays with mind because mind
(if an entelechy)—
shifting over here
will suggest a tone-gap, slant,
35a redshift as of direction
1968
Concerning the Exclusions of the Object
Today I
looked for myself,
head full of
stars,
5cosmic
dust in my teeth,
and small,
lost
as earth in such a
10world, I
fell around my
cell’s space
and said
I must be here—how
15can I get the seeker
home into these jaws:
how
can I expel these roomy stars?
1965 (1969)
The Makers
We slung do out of the rosy alligator
and
finding him somewhat flattened
opened
5our kits to engines of more
precise destruction
and set in to settled, intense abuse:
lovers and haters of dragons found
themselves
10grievously ready to do a little slicing
back:
it was hilarious, stupendous, and quite painful
until
ritualization so overtook us all
15that the only product dropping out from
slitting & stitching was
pocketbooks pocketbooks pocketbooks
from the colorful land of the
1968 (1968)
Levitation
What are you doing
up there
said the ground
that disastrous to seers
5and saints
is always around
evening scores, calling down:
I turned
cramped in abstraction’s gilded loft
10and
tried to think of something beautiful to say:
why
I said failing
I’m investigating the
15coming together of things:
the ground
tolerant of such
widened without sound
while I turning
20harmed my spine against
the peak’s inner visionless ribs—
heels free
neck locked in the upward drift—
and even the ground I think
25grew shaky
thinking something might be up there
able to get away.
1965
Medium
What small grace comes must
count hard
and then
belong to the poem that is in need
5not to my own redemption
except
as the mirror gives back the dream:
since I’m guilty
any crime
10will do
to pour my costly anguish to:
but
payment is exact,
strict and clear: the purchase
15never comes
or if so becomes a song
that takes its blessings to itself
and gets away.
1965 (1969)
Transfer
When the bee lands the
morning glory bloom
dips some and weaves:
the coming true of
5weight
from weightless wing-held
air
seems at the touch
implausible.
1967
Monday
Windowjarring gusts again
this morning:
the surf slapped back white:
shore cherry bushes
5trying to
stay put or get away:
the vague storm’s
aroused a weekend of
hyphochondria: today
10the doctors’ offices
froth with all
that tried to stay unruffled.
1968
Pluralist
Winds light & variable break
upward out
of cones or drop cones down
that turn up
5umbrellalike from the
ground
and even the maple tree’s large
enough to express contrary
notions
10one side going west & the
other east or northeast or one
up & the other
down: multiple angling:
the nodding, twisting, the
15stepping out & back
is like being of two minds
at least
and with the comforting
(though scary) exemplum
20that maple trees
go nowhere at all
1969 (1970)
Here & Now
Yes but
it’s October and the leaves
are going
fast: rain weighted
5them and then
a breeze
sent them in shoals clear across
the street
revealing
10especially in the backyard
young maple
branch-tip buds that assume
time as far away as
the other side of the sun
1968 (1970)
The Run-Through
You’re sick:
you’re on your back:
it’s hot:
they take off a leg:
5you wake up and feel,
both hands:
you develop pride
in the sewmanship
and show it:
10a tube in your skull bursts:
you bleed half
still:
with one arm
you show how
15the other flops:
you show, show:
speechless with pantomime:
you’re on your back:
it’s hot:
20they take the other one off:
then you fail
some
with the difficulty
of redundancy:
25you’re on your back:
you are heavy and hard:
your heart bursts and you are weightless:
you ride to a high stillness:
in death’s cure, you exit right.
1969 (1969)
The Put-Down Come On
You would think I’d be a specialist in contemporary
literature: novels, short stories, books of poetry,
my friends write many of them: I don’t read much
and some drinks are too strong for me: my empty-headed
5contemplation is still where the ideas of permanence
and transience fuse in a single body, ice, for example,
or a leaf: green pushes white up the slope: a maple
leaf gets the wobbles in a light wind and comes loose
half-ready: where what has always happened and what
10has never happened before seem for an instant reconciled:
that takes up most of my time and keeps me uninformed:
but the slope, after maybe a thousand years, may spill
and the ice have a very different look withdrawing into
the lofts of cold: only a little of that kind
of
15thinking flashes through: but turning the permanent also
into the transient takes up all the time that’s left.
1968
The City Limits
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
5lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue
10bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
15the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.
1970 (1971)
Previously Uncollected Poems from
COLLECTED POEMS 1951–1971 (1972)
To the memory of my mother and father
The Pieces of My Voice
The pieces of my voice have been thrown
away I said turning to the hedgerows
and hidden ditches
Where do the pieces of
5my voice lie scattered
The cedarcone said you have been ground
down into and whirled
Tomorrow I must go look under the clumps of
marshgrass in wet deserts
10and in dry deserts
when the wind falls from the mountain
inquire of the chuckwalla what he saw go by
and what the sidewinder found
risen in the changing sand
15I must run down all the pieces
and build the whole silence back
As I look across the fields the sun
big in my eyes I see the hills
the great black unwasting silence and
20know I must go out beyond the hills and seek
for I am broken over the earth—
so little remains
for the silent offering of my death
1955
Chaos Staggered Up the Hill
Chaos staggered up the hill
and got the daisies dirty
that were pretty along the road:
messy chaos I said
5but then in cooler mind saw
incipient eyes revolving in it
with possibly incipient sorrow
and had to admire how
it got along at all
10in its kind of weather:
passing, it engulfed me
and I couldn’t know dissolving
it had rhizobia with it
to make us green some other place.
1953
Eolith
I give you the wretched sympathy stone
tears there is no end to the common matter
dropped like suds water
down garbage shutes in places
5if you wish
Enlil has whipped your thighs with cane
and the possibility of unloading pity is
not greater than my giving it
there have been days like
10wasting
ziggurats while
your past spoils what is quick like river flies
days like
the sweep of a steppe I have gone out
15like a northwind over the Nile
cavernous
with Florida muddy hellish fountains of me it
is quite terrible
to think of it
20a shortening of days locusts dark west sounds
of oak limbs under pigeons
splitting in the night
roof mounting troubling clay gods river wind
I have sketched pyramids for
25viewing splendid Hamlet
a task waking at night in dark speed
the pelican’s over bays
carrying this eolith
1952
Hymn V
Assure us you side with order: throw
off atomicities, dots, events, endless
successions: reveal an ancient inclination
we can adore and ritualize
5with sapphirine cones and liturgies,
refine through ages of
canonical admissions and rejections; a
consistent, emerging inclination to prefer
the circling continuum, void receptacle,
10and eternal now: spare
us the accidents, controversies, novelties,
constant adaptations, the working truths and
tentative assessments, the upheavals and unrest
of an unquiet past shaken by
15the addition of a modern fact: package
knowledge, square-off questions, let them in
triumphs of finality be categorically
answered and filed: a
constant known yields all time to love: let our
20words grow out of and strengthen the authority
of old rich usage, upholding what upholds.
Spring Song
I picked myself up from the dust again
and went on
phoenix not with another set of wings but with
no other choice
5Oh I said to my soul may a deep
luminosity seize you
and my blanched soul smiled from its need and
dwelt on in the pale country of its bones
A field opened on the right
10and I went in
slipping arms-high through bleaches
of golden broom grass
and whirled with the wind sizzling there
Look said the golden tussocks and I
15looked down at the rising shoots
Where, if spring will not keep you,
will you go
I said to the broom straws
so I cried
20and stooping to scold the shoots fell
in with their green enhancing tips
and nearly died
getting away from the dividing place
At dusk the sun set and it was dark and having
25found no place to leave my loyalty
I slaughtered it by the road and spilled its
blood on sand while the red moon rose
1957 (1958)
Come Prima
I know
there is
perfection in the being
of my being,
5that I am
holy in amness
as stars or
paperclips,
that the universe,
10moving from void to void,
pours in and out
through me:
there is a point,
only itself,
15that fills space,
an emptiness
that is plenitude:
a void that is all being,
a being that is void:
20I am perfect:
the wind is perfect:
ditchwater, running, is perfect:
everything is:
I raise my hand
1957
Terminus
Coming to a rockwall
I looked back
to the winding gulch
and said
5is this as far as you can go:
an
d the gulch, rubble
frazzled with the windy remains
of speech, said
comers here turn and go back:
10so I sat down, resolved
to try
the problem out, and
every leaf fell
from my bush of bones
15and sand blew down the winding
gulch and
eddying
rounded out a bowl
from the terminal wall:
20I sat in my bones’ fragile shade
and worked the
knuckles of my mind till
the altering earth broke to
mend the fault:
25I rose and went through.
1959 (1971)
Back Country
The sun binds:
the small cold
moon
leading spins you,
5marionette:
the silver ruts of backwoods roads
narrowing
straiten your interests:
you keep moving:
10return is to your vitiations:
ahead, the road,
pure of you;
the pasture hills
fractured with
15hurls
of white rock,
unsurrendered to
your spoiling eyes;
plum blossoms
20uncast at your breath:
you have come