by A. R. Ammons
I can tell you what I need is
money and I don’t mean
a few thousand piddling shares of Standard Oil or
Xerox or a chunk
5of some up-and-coming (now over-the-counter) computer or
computer component stock:
what I need is a kind of expansive diversification
with exploding international implications,
pools, banks, and, in a figure, shoals
10of residual and seminal coin: what I need
to do is adopt a couple of ministates
and then enforce upon the populace the duty
of eating walnuts (which I’d ship in or
aid in the local growth of) and then
15the populace would be free
to do anything else it chose before or after or
even while eating walnuts
and then I’d return the fleet (or
else move myself to a ministate)
20to bring the shells back for my fireplace:
I like a nice walnut-shell fire
on a coolish autumn night.
1968
Emplacement
I can tell you what I need is
a stronger assortment of battleboasts:
I mean I need visions of toothy monsters
so old greens rot their sludgy toes
5so that meeting such visions (and, indeed,
apparently they cannot be avoided) I could
fetch myself up
on a blood-lilting flinching flight of battleboasts:
for I perceive the great work to be done is
10too often mismangled in committee, so lacks
all identity, all measuring out into
salient, songster-mongered cherishing:
what I need is for somebody to first of all
point me out a monster and then
15loosen a word-hoard or two jacking
my spine up to the duty for
to tell the truth my imagination’s sometimes
as pale as my spine’s always yellow.
1968
Touching Down
Body keeps talking under the mind
keeps bringing up lesser views
keeps insisting
but coaxingly in pale tones
5that the mind come on back, try
to get some rest,
allow itself to
be consoled
by slighter rather than slackened
10thirst: body keeps with light touch
though darkening
lines sketching
images of its mortality but not
to startle the mind further off
15hums
all right all right
1968
Spring Coming
The caryophyllaceae
like a scroungy
frost are
rising through the lawn:
5many-fingered as leggy
copepods:
a suggestive delicacy,
lacework, like
the scent of wild plum
10thickets:
also the grackles
with their incredible
vertical, horizontal,
reversible
15tails have arrived:
such nice machines.
1968
Ocean City
Island-end here is
elongated as a
porpoise’s nose, all
lawns and houses
5except one spot
where bending property lines have
turned out odd,
giving this plot
the sanctuary of contention—
10bayberry, wild
cherry, plum thicket:
a shore hawk
knows the spot,
knows grackles, sparrows,
15cardinals, even
mockingbirds cluster here:
he drops by &
right here in town
some early mornings wilderness
20meets wilderness
in a perfect stare.
1968 (1968)
Chasm
Put
your
self
out
and
you’re
not
quite
5
up
to
it
or
all
in
1968
Bearing Mercy
I spent with her
a
merciful night of
lubes &
5loblollies,
of goings out
& in &
by & through:
I held her
10in the teeth of my
need:
I turned her round
smartly
like a fumbled
15beachball: in
the morning she
got up
& her tiny hand
touched her
20hair, day’s
first flower.
1968
Tossup
This wall interrupts the wind:
sand falls out:
bushes loft vines
& mockingbird &
5caterpillar have their ways:
is this wall anything more than
an interruption:
nothing outlasts the last things
across the surfaces of Nothing:
10okay I said
I believe in faith,
this soft determination,
this blasted wall.
1968
Plexus
The knot in my gut’s
my good center:
I can trim
off fume & froth,
5glob & dollop,
come in there and
be
hard as indivisible:
or trusting
10the locked twist
float off office
buildings of glassy
mind,
confident if they
15don’t land they’ll
circle back some day.
1968
Three
The floodcrest of afternoon passes:
the blood smooths:
they say a roar’s in the world:
here nothing is loud or incomplete:
5the yellow iris with a fabulous surrender
has flopped triple-open, available:
sheaves of pointed fingers,
clusters of new holly leaves assume
the air: the redwinged blackbird’s
10jeer’s aboriginally whole in the
thicket across the street: if nothing’s
broken, then I’m alone for sure.
1968
Miss
Wonder if
you’re gross
consider the cosmic
particle so scant
5it can splink all
the way through
Cheops
nicking nothing
1968
Celestial
The most beautiful, haunting
dusk scenes around here, clumps of
tidal-marsh reeds on a highway’s edge
with supple dark-green
5cedar and tough bayberry and such
full of widges, mean
and manyful, opaque with invisibility:
nature turns so wide it can afford to
spoil an interweaving of scapes or
10flashing an Icarus by endanger the minds
of several listening millions whose
creation was superb if not special.
1968
Correction
The burdens of the world
on my back
lighten the world
not a whit while
5removing them greatly
decreases my specific
gravity
1968
&nb
sp; Mirrorment
Birds are flowers flying
and flowers perched birds.
1968
Coming To
Like a steel drum
cast at sea
my days,
banged and dented
5by a found shore of
ineradicable realities,
sandsunk, finally, gaping,
rustsunk in
compass grass
1968
Even
Complexity o’erwhelms the gist,
engravities the grist and grits up
the anflob of the flubile:
hurts:
5nabs the numbance, fritters the foamost,
fractures the raptors and
rippling rislings:
finding a nut to fit a
bolt is an undertaking.
1968
Windy Trees
You’d be surprised how short the roads
in the air are today:
they twist, drop, burst, and climb:
such roads the sparrows have trouble on:
5in fact the only thing flying around
here today’s the grackle and he
goes over the brush so low looks as if
he’s beating something up from hiding:
it’s just like reality,
10the very day you can’t get out to fly
there’s also no place comfortable to sit.
1968
Photosynthesis
The sun’s wind
blows the fire
green, sails the
chloroplasts,
5lifts banks, bogs,
boughs into flame:
the green ash of
yellow loss.
1968
Making Waves
Some mornings of maximal
frustration—wind,
rain four days old—
your hate waves rise &
5slap around the walls:
I float, smile, above the
unadmitted show:
but soon, bobbing, send a few
waves out myself and
10the two sets
sloshing against each other
agitate the environment
or coming into beat
raise waves so big we both
15get scared and hussle out the
oilslicks of consolation.
1968
Clearing
It’s day again, the fourth day,
still overcast and sprinkling:
but the wind’s stopped:
the trees and bushes in
5profound rest
hold beads:
occasionally a bead drops and a
spur of leaves springs upright:
if the sun breaks out an
10amazing number of things will change.
1968
The Account
The difference, finding the
difference: earth, no heavier
with me here, will be no
lighter when I’m gone: sum or
5subtraction equals zero: no
change—not to the loss of a
single electron’s spin—will
net from my total change:
is that horror or opportunity:
10should I spurn earth now with
mind, toss my own indifference
to indifference, invent some
other scale that assents to
temporary weight, make something
15substanceless as love earth can’t
get to with changeless changing:
will my electrical system noumenally
at the last moment leap free
and, weightless, will it
20have any way to deal—or if
there is some thinnest weight,
what will it join with, how
will it neighbor: something finer
than perception, a difference
25so opposite to ground it will
have no mass, indifferent to mass.
1968
Winter Saint
In the summer I live so
close to my neighbor I
can hear him sweat:
all my forced bushes, leafy
5and birdy, do not
prevent this:
his drawers wrenched
off his sticky butt
clutch my speech white:
10his beery mouth wakes up
under my tongue: his
lawnmower wilts my cereal:
I do not like to hear him
wheeze over difficult weeds:
15I don’t like his squishy toes:
I’m for ice and shutters
and the miles and miles
winter clears between us.
1968
The Imagined Land
I want a squirrel-foil for my martin pole
I want to perturb some laws of balance
I want to create unnatural conditions
I want to eliminate snakes, rats,
5cats, martens from dread
I want above the sloping foil regions of
exceptional deliverance
I want my evening air trimmed bug clear
(pits of bottomless change
10shot through the clarifying ambience)
I want design heightened into
artificial imbalances of calm
I want a squirrel-foil for my martin pole
1968
The King of Ice
Now and then the intolerable crooks
down around my temples
and binds—an ice-vice, you could
say, vice-ice—a crown of ice:
5kings know how to take matters
casually, so I just sit there cold,
intensely inward, brow bowed,
loneliness universal: I wait:
I’m not going anywhere: I
10wait for the thing to slip or for
my attention to fix, somewhere on
the inner glacier, on polar bears
in disconcerting romp: I figure
the intolerable not to be dealt with,
15just set aside: I am going to
wait: look at these interesting
stitches in my robes, I say:
I’ve already settled my affairs of state;
that is, I’ll take the cold when it comes,
20but I will never believe in ice.
1968
Village, Town, City—Highway, Road, Path
Grove, forest, jungle—a thickening motion
accompanied by a sense of loss of control:
swamp: ah, an uncertain or sloppy (hungry) bottom:
flood moccasins lining the bayous, drowning snakes
5rafting down the gulf-wide river: patch, copse,
thicket—a surrounding tameness with a touch of
central wilderness: let a dog belch up worms—
they string from his mouth in a white beard,
his eyes grave, tamed, shamed to affliction:
10but affliction can storm from shame and
tussle the peripheries of order: but take a word,
there are backward suasions: you may have twice
as much of anything as you ask: my yard maple’s
in the open, full of leaf, and single to the wind.
1969
Lonely Splendor
I tell the maple it’s unwise—though
it stands open
and alone—to put too much splendor
of leaf on
5so that rather than stand firm and quiver
to the wind it rolls
raising whole branches on a swell
that plays out into tossing and twisting
at the top:
10but, of course, it is
difficult to tell
the inner thrust it can’t ornament the whole
open universe, such quenchless
putting out and on:
the bounty of your heavy ship,
what may be assumed, what saved:
if I were a maple I’d want neighbors
to keep me skinny and high
20in windbreaking thickets:
but then loneliness can’t be cajoled
to give a leaf up
(or keep one in)
and can’t believe slim thickets
25do any slender speaking worthy note.
1969
The Swan Ritual
Yield to the tantalizing mechanism:
fall, trusting and centered as a
drive, following into the poem:
line by line pile entanglements on,
5arrive willfully in the deepest
fix: then, the thing done, turn
round in the mazy terror and
question, outsmart the mechanism:
find the glide over-reaching or
10dismissing—halter it into
a going concern so the wing
muscles at the neck’s base work
urgency’s compression and
openness breaks out lofting
15you beyond all binds and terminals.
1969
He Said
Speaking to mountains (&
hearing them speak!) assiduously
(though encounteringly)
avoids the personal,
5a curvature whose swerve, however,
can out-range the scary planets
and seriously attenuate
the gravitational
core which wanting the personal
10had to give it up:
being can’t always be as it is:
volcanoes, droughts, quakes,
natural disasters of all kinds,
including (heavy rain &)
15the personal,
mitigate much fixity, the dwelling