by A. R. Ammons
of mind in its dwelling:
my immediate sympathetic reaction was
that I understood all that
20well in a way
and said it seemed reasonable that
mountains, though,
should attract such voices and
furnish such replies.
1969
One More Time
I took my likely schizophrenia in hand
and said if
it must be the high places, let’s go to them,
muse how they lie about, see how
5the lessening to immateriality occurs,
how the peaks, chipping off, folding in, loft
free to the danger of floating, endure
the falling away, the unneighboring to high isolation:
the essential reductions to form
10and to rock, the single substance,
gained, we’ll confront puzzling air, from
the strictest consideration to the freest,
and the height made we’ll have the choiceless ease
of the single choice, down, and leisure to come on
15deepening multiplicity,
trifling, discrete abundance,
bottomless diversity, down into the pines,
morning glories and trout streams
(where the lacewing works the evening, marginal air)
20blueberry brush: high-slope cucumber vines abearing.
1969 (1970)
Drought
Bees turn in a fire
of dry-rich honey,
visit the faucet
for the left, crescent
5drop: below the faucet
by the cool cement a
webbed bumblebee spins:
the spider, whilom serene,
attacks to feed
10another filament in: I
can’t understand
for a minute why
the bumblebee
works so hard into the
15straitening maze:
but Lord I know why:
it’s to find if not flight
the far end of the dark.
1969
Image
The indefinable idol’s invisible to the mind:
its visage unmonstrous and unsaintly’s unavailable
to the iconoclast who in the whirling wind learns
something of his whirling subduing, which is
5primary instruction: of course, it breaks down
into griffins, calves, beavers, gargoyles but
re-summed shoulders up again and disappears: because
it disappears, the put-down’s universal and complete:
but then the ignorant and stupid, the unerring
10majority, think something’s died and promote the
precision of the visibly defined: the more partial,
the more certain, until partiality collapses under
its exclusions: that’s another kind of death
that draws human blood: oh, how I wish the notion
15of unity could get around: how I wish the idol could
hold summed his attributes, empty free the mind.
1969
Equinox
I went out to cut a last batch of zinnias this
morning from the back fencerow and got my shanks
chilled for sure: furrowy dark gray clouds with
separating fringes of blue sky-grass: and dew
5beaded up heavier than the left-overs of rain:
in the zinnias, in each of two, a bumblebee
stirring in slow-motion, trying to unwind
the webbed drug of cold, buzzing occasionally but
with a dry rattle: bees die with the burnt honey
10at their mouths, at least: the fact’s established:
it is not summer now and the simmering buzz is out of
heat: the zucchini blossoms falling show squash
overgreen with stunted growth: the snapdragons have
suckered down into a blossom or so: we passed
15into dark last week the even mark of day and night
and what we hoped would stay we yield to change.
1969
Russet Gold
The shoddy furbishings I pick and choose among,
having, as I have, little hope of the foil brights
shimmering, those ghastly ecstatic blankouts
of rosy coordination in complete deliveries: no:
5I take the radiance in, for example, rain, or shiver
to drops beaded up on cellophane: I tell you
when the bark loosens on a soggy stick, I can
get into that space and respire: and have thoughts
otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to assume:
10half the time I’m unable, frankly, from a hurtful
capacity to imagine my own privation: but the other
half, I can wait with a yew drop, whether it will
evaporate or, struck by a rapid augmentation, splish,
presuming that the rain is, as here it often is, light
15if long: when everything’s given up,
amazingly, I think, so much stuff to give up,
and reluctantly, appears: everybody’s seen a cast
feather, the dislocation: that’s something: and when
a zinnia turns all cone, it’s certainly not into
20disorder or waste: I don’t expect to busy
much with or in the sun, ghosts my valid glimmerers.
1969
Essay on Poetics
Take in a lyric information
totally processed, interpenetrated into
wholeness where
a bit is a bit, a string a string, a
5cluster a cluster, everything beefing up
and verging out
for that point in the periphery where
salience bends into curve
and all saliences bend to the same angle of
10curve and curve becomes curve, one curve, the whole curve:
that is information actual
at every point
but taking on itself at every point
the emanation of curvature, of meaning, all
15the way into the high
recognition of wholeness, that synthesis,
feeling, aroused, controlled, and released:
but then find the wholeness
unbelievable because it permits
20another wholeness,
another lyric, the same in structure,
in mechanism of existence, but bearing a different weight,
that is, a different, perhaps contradicting,
bit-nature and assimilation:
25wholeness then is a condition of existence,
a one:many mechanism, internally irrelevant to scope,
but from the outside circumscribed into scope:
I like the order that allows, say, when
a thousand cows are on a thousand acres,
30clusters to flow out in single file down a gully,
encirclings of drinkholes, concentrations in a green
bottom, spread-outs, but identifiable, across
a broad rise or scape: I like that just as I
like tracings converging into major paths,
35untracings of widening out beyond a clump of
trees or small pass:
those configurations, rendered by aerial photography,
would interest me endlessly
in the precision of their topographical relations:
40the interests of cows and the possibilities of
the landscape could be read (not a single actual cow)
there well: and nothing be as a consequence known and
yet everything in a sense known, the widest paths
the controlling symbols, with lesser resemblances of
45motion: after a while I could account for the motions of
the whole herd and make interesting statements:
>
for example, with experience, I bet I could tell
from the wear under a copse
whether a lot of hot sunny days in a year
50or windy days come: I could tell something obvious already
from the copse whether it constitutes a meaningful
windbreak in a cold wind, sand or snow storm, and then
that, though obvious, would tell about cows:
I’ll bet in warm climates with heavy, maybe daily, rains
55there’d be little wear under trees, for the cows
would enjoy being out in the showers:
anyway, there’s a time when loose speech has to give in,
come up to the corral, run through the planked alleys,
accept the brand, the medication, surrender to the
60identity of age, sex, weight, and bear its relationship
to the market: there’s no market for most speech, specially
good, and none for loose: that’s why I don’t care
how far I wander off;
I wouldn’t care if I found a whole year gone by and myself
65not called for: the way I think is
I think what I see: the designs are there: I use
words to draw them out—also because I can’t
draw at all: I don’t think: I see: and I see
the motions of cowpaths
70over a non-existent, thousand-acre ranch: (times
frequently recur in good scope in which I don’t see):
stop on any word and language gives way:
the blades of reason, unlightened by motion, sink in,
melting through, and reality’s cold murky waters
75accept the failure: for language heightens by dismissing reality,
the sheet of ice a salience controlling, like a symbol,
level of abstraction, that has a hold on reality and suppresses
it, though formed from it and supported by it:
motion and artificiality (the impositional remove from reality)
80sustain language: nevertheless, language must
not violate the bit, event, percept,
fact—the concrete—otherwise the separation that means
the death of language shows: when that happens abandonment
is the only terrible health and a return to bits, re-trials
85of lofty configurations: if the organism of the ranch
alters, weeds will grow in old paths and the new waterhole
exist in a new weaving: means, reaching identity too
soon, exclude: mannerism is more suitable to the lyric
than to larger affairs because both lyric and manneristic style
90are slight completions: dropping back from the completion
to a linear mode can be more engrossing: for example, the
dactyllic hexameter can grind on, entangling, ingesting bits,
threads, strings, lesser saliences into considerable scope: or
iambic pentameter, especially unrhymed, is an infinitely various
95ployable means: one must be ever in search of the rapier that
holds the world on guard: but the sparrow trap traps a sparrow:
(disquisition is sesquipedalian pedestrianism, tidying up
the loose bits, but altogether missing the import of the impetus):
a center’s absolute, if relative: but every point in spacetimematter’s
100a center: reality is abob with centers: indeed, there is
nothing but centers: centers of galaxies, systems, planets, asteroids,
moons, drifts, atoms, electrons: and the center, as of the
earth, where all turns and pressures meet, is inexpressibly light,
still, and empty: the spruce trees at this moment deeply
105sway with snow and snow is falling, the temperature below
freezing: the muffled morning offered no relief: now, though;
just after noon, small gusts twist the branches: not
the heavy lower branches, too long in their holding, and too wide,
to respond: but twist the lighter, higher branches so they drop
110falls of snow and those falls, light, their efficacy increased
by falling, strike the lower, heavier loads, dislodging airy
avalanches, sketchy with event but releasing: it seems to me
a possibility of unceasing magnitude that these structures
permit these eventualities: small winds with small branches can
115loosen heavy postures: a miraculous increase, as if heat could
go uphill: but occurring within a larger frame, at great potential
expense: (but energy displacements, switches, translations are
too considerable for calculation in the smallest sector): still,
though the whole may be running down, spills
120here and there are overspills, radiances: the lyric, then,
has never been found out because at the center it, too, is
empty, still, silent: this is a point of provisional
summation: hence, the thens, stills, and buts:
a point of entangling toward the intertwining of a core, a core
125involving every thread: so far, we have ranch, snowsquall,
avalanche, ice skates, wind, etc.: but the main confluence
is one:many which all this essay is about: I get lost for fun,
because there’s no chance of getting lost: I am seeking the
mechanisms physical, physiological, epistemological, electrical,
130chemical, esthetic, social, religious by which many, kept
discrete as many, expresses itself into the
manageable rafters of salience, lofts to comprehension, breaks
out in hard, highly informed suasions, the “gathering
in the sky” so to speak, the trove of mind, tested
135experience, the only place there is to stay, where the saints
are known to share accord and wine, and magical humor floats
upon the ambient sorrow: much is nearly stable there,
residencies perpetual, more than less, where gold is utterly
superfluous and paves the superfluous streets, where phenomena
140lose their drift to the honey of eternity: the holy bundle of
the elements of civilization, the Sumerians said: the place
where change is mere disguise, where whatever turns turns
in itself: there is no reason for confusion: that is
what this is about: it’s simple and impossibly difficult,
145simple by grandeur, impossible by what all must answer there:
enterprise is our American motif, riding horseback between
the obscure beginning and the unformulated conclusion, thinking
grace that show of riding, the expertise, performance, the intricacy
of dealing: to be about something: history can assign and glean,
150furnish sources and ends, give grades: that is the
enterprise of history, always best when best accomplished: since
the one thing we learn from history is that we do not learn:
enterprise then’s the American salience, rainbow arch,
colossus: but the aristoi are beauty, wealth, birth, genius &
155virtue who should be gouvernors: enterprise somewhat, though
not necessarily, inconsistent with those, we lack governors:
the definition of definition goes two ways, opposing:
one direction cuts away, eliminating from relevance, limits
into true: take the word true: it goes back through ME.
160treue, trewe to AS. treowe, trywe to a kinship with G. treu
and on to IE. derew, meaning tree, in the basic sense of as
firm as a tree: if one could be sure of Indo-European forests
one might add lofty, abundant, straight, strong, majestic:
somewhere then in the essence of tree has been
found the
165essence of true, including perhaps the perpendicularity or
verticality of true: but while tree clarifies the
mind with certain boundaries, it also recalls clusters
of tree-images, memories of particular
trees, and a sense of a translation (separation) in the mind which
170is trying to distil tree, a luminous, ideal image-tree, the truest
tree, from the actual clusters of memory: it is necessary
then to turn the essential image of a tree into the truest
rational wordage: truth, then, might be “conformity
with the facts”: but then we know that facts have truth
175when touched, given configuration by transforming,
informing fiction: is this unnecessarily
puzzling: all I mean to suggest is that the reality under
words (and images) is too multiple for rational assessment and
that language moves by sailing over: the
180other way definition has is to accept the multiplicity of
synthesis: of course, synthesis is at work in certain levels of
analysis, but I mean by synthesis the primary intent: look
at it this way: I am experiencing at the moment several
clusters of entanglement: if I took a single thread from a
185single cluster, viewed it, explained it, presented it, would