by A. R. Ammons
I not be violating my reality into artificial clarity and my
bundles into artificial linearity: but if I broached, as I seem
to be doing, too many clusters, would I not be violating this
typewriter’s mode into nonsense: hue a middle way, the voice
190replied, which is what I’m doing the best I can,
that is to say, with too many linking verbs: the grandest
clustering of aggregates permits the finest definition: so out
of that bind, I proceed a little way into similarity and
withdraw a bit into differentiae: unfortunately, man cannot
195do better though it might be better done: if I begin with
the picture of a lyre, translate it into a thousand words,
do I have a lyric: what is a lyre-piece: a brief and single
cry: the quickest means to a still point in motion:
three quatrains rhyming alternate lines: let me see if I can
200write a poem to help heave the point:
At Once
Plumage resembles foliage
for camouflage often
and so well at times it’s difficult
205to know whether nature means
resembler or resembled:
obviously among things is
included the preservation of
distinction in a seeming oneness:
210I say it not just
because I often have: maximum
diversity with maximum unity
prevents hollow easiness.
poetry, even in its
215self-rationale aims two ways at once, polar ways sometimes
to heighten the crisis and pleasure of the reconciliation:
getting back to tree and true, though, I was thinking last
June, so multiple and dense is the reality of a tree, that I
ought to do a booklength piece on the elm in the backyard here:
220I wish I had done it now because it could stand for truth, too:
I did do a sketch one day which might suggest the point:
I guess it’s a bit airy to get mixed up with
an elm tree on anything
like a permanent basis: but I’ve had it
225worse before—talking stones and bushes—and may
get it worse again: but in this one
the elm doesn’t talk: it’s just an object, albeit
hard to fix:
unfixed, constantly
230influenced and influencing, still it hardens and enters
the ground at a fairly reliable point:
especially since it’s its
general unalterability that I need to define and stress
I ought to know its longitude and latitude,
235so I could keep checking them out: after all, the ground
drifts:
and rises: and maybe rises slanting—that would be
difficult to keep track of, the angle
could be progressive or swaying or
240seasonal, underground rain
& “floating” a factor: in hilly country
the underground mantle, the
“float” bedrock is in, may be highly variable and variable
in effect:
245I ought to know the altitude, then, from some fixed point:
I assume the fixed point would have to be
the core center of the planet, though I’m perfectly
prepared to admit the core’s involved
in a slow—perhaps universal—slosh that would alter the
250center’s position
in terms of some other set of references I do not
think I will at the moment entertain
since to do so invites an outward, expanding
reticulation
255too much to deal precisely with:
true, I really ought to know where the tree is: but I know
it’s in my backyard:
I’ve never found it anywhere else and am willing to accept
the precision of broadness: with over-precision
260things tend to fade: but since I do need stability and want
to make the tree stand for that (among other things)
it seems to me I ought to be willing to learn enough about
theory and instrument
to take sights for a few days or weeks and see if anything
265roundly agreeable could be winnowed out: that
ought to include altimeters (several of them, to average
instrumental variation), core theory and gravity waves:
but I’m convinced I’m too awkward
and too set in some ways
270to take all that on: if I am to celebrate multiplicity,
unity, and such
I’ll be obliged to free myself by accepting certain
limitations:
I am just going to take it for granted
275that the tree is in the backyard:
it’s necessary to be quiet in the hands of the marvelous:
I am impressed with the gradualism of sway,
of growth’s sway: the bottom limb that John’s
swing’s on and that’s largely horizontal
280has gradually outward toward the tip
demonstrated the widening of the leaves
by
sinking: the rate of sinking, which is the rate of
growth, has been
285within the variations of night and day, rain and shine,
broadly constant
and the branch’s adjustment to that growth
of a similar order: nevertheless, the
wind has lifted, a respiratory floating, the branch
290as if all the leaves had breathed in, many a
time
and let it fall
and rain and dew have often lowered it below its depth—
birds have lighted bringing
295varying degrees of alteration to the figurings, sharp
distortions, for example, to the
twigs, slow dips to secondary branches, perhaps no
noticeable effect at the branch root:
I should go out and measure the diameters of
300the branch, secondary branches, small limbs, and twigs
and their extensions from base
and devise a mathematics
to predict the changes of located average birds: it
would give me plenty to do for weeks
305and save me from the rigors of many heights:
or scoot me to them: conceiving a fact stalls the
imagination to its most threatening dimension:
I think now of growth at the edges of the leaves as the
reverse of the elmworm’s forage:
310the elmworm, I haven’t seen any this year—one spring
there were millions—is as to weight an interesting
speculation:
as he eats the leaf lessens but of course the weight is
added to himself, so on a quick scale the
315transformation is one to one:
but the worm makes waste, the efficiency of his mechanisms
average and wasteful: in the long range, then,
worms lighten trees and let in light: but that’s
another problem: could it be maintained that
320the worm lets in light enough
to increase growth equal to his destruction:
it’s a good point, a true variable, but surely
any sudden defoliation by a plague of worms
would be harmful: a re-entry of winter (though possibly
325with all of winter’s possibility): time and number figure
mysteriously here:
one should be patient and note large results,
reserve some time for broad awareness:
broad awareness is the gift of settled minds: or of
330minds hurt high from painful immediacy: it eliminates
and jettisons
sensory contact with too much accident and event—total
dependencies at the edge: the man
fully aware,
335unable to separate out certain large motions, probably
couldn’t move: it’s better, I think, to be
broadly and emptily aware so as more efficiently
to negotiate the noons of recurrence:
(I have come lately to honor gentleness so:
340it’s because
of my engagement with
tiny sets and systems of energy, nucleations and constructs,
that I’m unnerved with the slight and needful
of consideration: part of consideration’s
345slightness: it approaches and stands off peripherally
quiet and patient should a gesture
be all that’s right
but of course it will on invitation tend:
it never blunts or overwhelms with aid
350or transforms in order to be received):
while shade increases equally with surface area of leaf
the net result’s
a considerable variance:
leaves inter-shade
355but the result on the ground’s non-accumulative:
in May last year, a month before the above sketch, I did another
briefer thing:
elm seed, maple
seed shower
360loose when the wind
stirs, a spring-wind harvesting
(when so many things
have to be picked—take strawberries,
stooped to and crawled
365along before, or the finger-bluing
of blueberries):
everything so
gentle and well
done: I sit down not to flaw
370the ambience:
the elm seed’s winged all round
and exists, a sheathed
swelling, in the center: it
can flutter,
375spin,
or, its axis just right, slice
with a draft or cut through one:
(it doesn’t go very far but it can
get out of the shade):
380then there’s the maple seed’s oar-wing:
it spins too
(simply, on an ordinary day)
but in a gust can glide broadside:
(dandelion seeds in a head are
385noted for their ability to become detached
though attached:
with a tiny splint-break
the wind can have a bluster of them:
the coming fine of an intimation):
390those are facts, one-sided extensions:
since the wind’s indifferent
the seeds take pains to
make a difference:
praise god for the empty and undesigned:
395hampered by being ungreat poetry, incapable of
carrying quick conviction into imagination’s locked clarity,
nevertheless these pieces establish the point
that a book might be written on the interpenetrations of
appearance of an elm tree, especially when the seasons could be
400brought in, the fluff cresting snow limbs, the stars and the
influence of starlight on growth or stunting—I have no
idea how such distance affects leaves—the general surround, as of
wind, rain, air pollution, bird shade, squirrel nest: books
by the hundred have already been written on cytology, the
405study of cells, and in an elm tree there are twelve quintillion cells,
especially in the summer foliage, and more takes place by way
of event, disposition and such in a single cell than any computer
we now have could keep registration of, given the means of deriving
the information: but if I say books could be written about a single
410tree I mean to say only that truth is difficult, even when
noncontradicting; that is, the mere massive pile-up of information
is recalcitrant to higher assimilations without great loss of
concretion, without wide application of averaging: things are
reduced into knowledge: and truth, as some kind of lofty reification,
415is so great a reduction it is vanished through by spirit only, a
parallelogram, square or beam of light, or perhaps a more casual
emanation or glow: when so much intellectual energy seems to be
coming to nothing, the mind searches its culture clutch for meaningful
or recurrent objects, finds say a crown or flag or apple or tree or
420beaver and invests its charge in that concretion, that focus: then
the symbol carries exactly the syrup of many distillations and
hard endurance, soft inquiry and turning: the symbol apple and the
real apple are different apples, though resembled: “no ideas but in
things” can then be read into alternatives—“no things but in ideas,”
425“no ideas but in ideas,” and “no things but in things”: one thing
always to keep in mind is that there are a number of possibilities:
whatever sways forward implies a backward sway and the mind must
either go all the way around and come back or it must be prepared
to fall back and deal with the lost sway, the pressure for dealing
430increasing constantly with forwardness: it’s surprising to me
that my image of the orders of greatness comes in terms of descent:
I would call the lyric high and hard, a rocky loft, the slow,
snowline melt of individual crystalline drops, three or four to
the lyric: requires precision and nerve, is almost always badly
435accomplished, but when not mean, minor: then there is the rush,
rattle, and flash of brooks, pyrotechnics that turn water white:
poetry is magical there, full of verbal surprise and dashed
astonishment: then, farther down, the broad dealing, the smooth
fullness of the slow, wide river: there starts the show of genius,
440in motion, massive beyond the need of disturbing surprise, but, still,
channeled by means—the land’s—other than its own: genius, and
the greatest poetry, is the sea, settled, contained before the first
current stirs but implying in its every motion adjustments
throughout the measure: one recognizes an ocean even from a dune and
445the very first actions of contact with an ocean say ocean over and
over: read a few lines along the periphery of any of the truly
great and the knowledge delineates an open shore:
what is to be gained from the immortal person except the experience
of ocean: take any line as skiff, break the breakers, and go out
450into the landless, orientationless, but perfectly contained, try
the suasions, brief dips and rises, and the general circulations,
the wind, the abundant reductions, stars, and the experience is
obtained: but rivers, brooks, and trickles have their uses and
special joys and achieve, in their identities, difficult absoluteness:
455but will you say, what of the content—why they are all made of water:
but will you, because of the confusion, bring me front center as
a mere mist or vapor: charity is greater than poetry: enter it,
in consideration of my need and weakness: I find I am able to say
only what is in my head: a heady constraint: and to say it only
460as well as I can: inventory my infirmities and substitute
your love for them, and let us hold on to one another and
move right away from petulant despair: to broach a summary, I
would say the problem is scie
ntific—how is reality to be
rendered: how is 4,444 to be made 444 and 44 and 4 and 1: I
465have the shaky feeling I’ve just said something I don’t trust:
poems are arresting in two ways: they attract attention with
glistery astonishment and they hold it: stasis: they gather and
stay: the progression is from sound and motion to silence and
rest: for example, I can sit in this room, close my eyes, and
470reproduce the whole valley landscape, still: I can see the
southern end of Lake Cayuga, I can see Stewart Park, the highways,
the breaking out and squaring up of Ithaca, I can see the hill-ridges
rising from the Lake, trees, outcroppings of rocks, falls, ducks
and gulls, the little zoo, the bridges: I can feel my eyesight
475traveling around a held environment: I am conscious that the
landscape is fixed at the same time that I can move around in it:
a poem is the same way: once it is thoroughly known, it contains
its motion and can be reproduced whole, all its shapeliness intact,
to the mind at the same time the mind can travel around in it and
480know its sound and motion: nothing defined can
be still: the verbal moves, depends there, or sinks into unfocused
irreality: ah, but when the mind is brought to silence, the
non-verbal, and the still, it’s whole again to see how motion goes:
the left nest in the shrub has built up a foothigh cone of snow
485this morning and four sparrows sitting in the quince bush are
the only unaugmented things around: eight more inches are piling
on to ten we had and every evergreen has found the way it would
lean in a burden, split its green periphery and divide: John’s
old tractor on the lawn only shows its steering wheel: the
490snowplow’s been by and blocked the driveway: it’s December 26: