by A. R. Ammons
old roof snow, heavy-bottomed with melt and freeze,
began at sunrise to drop at the eaves, each drop
5discrete as a plectrum: then the old icicles
loosened at the root and fell into brown chrysanthemum
stalks (and snapdragons, still green!) and then as
morning tided, seeing down the angle of the drops
was like watching a rain section, and then by noon,
10the wind risen, the eaves swung ragged with sound
and glitter: I felt the roof rise as if to relief,
ten weeks turning casually to water: the afternoon
was lovely and constant (except, wingfeathers in a
ground-melt, I shoved the mound aside to find, as if alive,
15a pheasant under snow): at dusk, a patch of white
still centered on the roof, I went out to check and
sure enough the motions had lessened: spicule icicles
lengthened into a lessening overflow, the music cold-skimpy.
1970
Satyr Formalist
As the perpetual laugher about the grounds,
the grouped yews and carved high stones (always
in a diminishment, looking for light),
as the caperer of flat stones, their intervals
5a watery disarray nevertheless along directions, the
light dunker of lilypad leaves (to see the jewels
roll in and stand), as the caresser of whatever
gets too far into the dark, the whickerer at
hints of gross intent, sampler of hues and
10cornices, he touched death for the first time as
the smallest significance of a tremble in the thighs,
the rounding white of the moon in his eyes, stricture
by the thornbush border, and uncomprehending, like
us, uncomprehending, he took to it blank, vacancy
15to vacancy, brittle, fine, dew-bush’s pool drop.
1970
Late Romantic
Change the glacier’s loneliness and the ice melts,
streams going off into sundry identity systems,
bog floats, lakes, clouds, seas, drinking water:
flux heightens us into knots of staid tension:
5we live and go about containing various swirls:
too much swirling improves loneliness poorly:
we take advantage of separateness to unite sensible
differences, the tube in the fineness of its coupling
nearly a merging: well, nothing’s perfect: fall
10away, of course—we have other things to do alone,
go to the bathroom, brush our teeth, reel:
how can we give ourselves away if we’re not separate
enough to be received: and, given away, we know
no desire but the other’s desire: and given each
15to each, we’re both both, indistinguishably, sort of.
1970
Spaceship
It’s amazing all
this motion going
on and
water can lie still
5in glasses and the gas
can in the
garage doesn’t rattle.
1970
Cleavage
Soon as
you stop
having trouble
getting down
5to earth
you start
having trouble
getting off
the ground
1970
Schooling
Out mountainward, I explained I’ve already
yielded to so much, truly, an abundance,
to seas, of course, ranges, glaciers, large
rivers, to the breadth of plains, easily to
5outcroppings of bedrock, specially those
lofted amalgamated magmas, grainy, dense, and
easily to waterfalls double-hands can’t halt:
but now I’m looking to yield to lesser
effects, wind-touch of a birch branch, for
10example, weed-dip, tilting grasses in seed,
the brush of a slipped lap of lakewater
over a shore stone: I think I’m almost
down to shadows, yielding to their masses,
for my self out here, taut against the mere
15suasion of a star, is explaining, dissolving
itself, saying, be with me wind bent at leaf
edges, warp me puddle riffle, show me
the total yielding past shadow and return.
1970
Space Travel
Go down the left
hand side of the yard,
a contrived bankslope,
down to the corner of
5the lot, past the
forsythia bushes now
all green, and look
back up toward the house,
the lawn, the young
10maple, the bushes along
the foundation & you can
practically work up
a prospect: vision adjusts:
feeling roomy is room
15enough and many a
twenty-mile out-west view
thins to staging:
it’s going to be all right
I think, for those
20who wish to live, at least:
there are some who do.
1970
High Surreal
Spit the pit in the pit
I told the cherry eater
and see what crumbling
shoulders, gully washes,
5& several other bardic
dimensions can produce:
possibly a shiny asbestos
tree with cherry
nuts—reversal obvious
10in the formation—but
if you come to impossible
productions on
absent trees, get out the
bulldozer and shove the
15whole thing over smooth.
1970 (1971)
Sharp Lookout
Rain still falls, the wind moves
the maple branches to
gestures and patterns reasonable:
the stream deals with rocks
5and hollows, slowing or dashing,
in ways apparently regular: whole
bushes and even tall trees
light up as usual with song to
the songbird out of sight:
10the clouds that have never taken
shape are shapely: the bulby,
engrossing sun splinters red
through the hedge toward dusk:
though I’ve been expecting
15a wrench or unpraiseworthy re-ordering
to shock loose any moment from
lost curvatures, I’ve not been able
today to form evidence of any
trend countering our prospects
20for a moderate life and a safe death.
1970
Right On
The tamarack can cut rain down to size, mist-little
bead-gauze, hold at needlepoint a plenty
and from the going, blue-sunk storm keep a
shadow, glittery recollection: the heart-leaved
5big hydrangea bends over blossom-nodding, a few
large drops and a general glaze streaking leaves
with surface tension: the maple leaves
gather hail-size drops at the lobes and
sway them ragged loose: spirea, quince, cedar,
10elm, hollyhock, clover (a sharp beader)
permit various styles of memory: then the sun
breaks out and clears the record of what is gone.
1970
Rectitude
Last night’s thunderstorm’s
glancing quick shifts of strong wind and
heavy sheets of tensed up
beating down rain
5have left the snapdragons
velvet-hung in red bead
/>
bedraggled, a
disorientation extreme:
but this morning,
10the clouds clearing, the sun
breaking its one source out,
light is working in the stems’ cells,
drawing up, adjusting, soft alignments
coming true, and pretty soon
15now the prevailing command “attention!”
will seem to have been uttered suddenly.
1970 (1972)
Object
X out the rondure of
the totally satisfying
and all other sizable areas
near the central scope:
5that degree, that circumference,
put aside: the leftovers,
though, pips & squeaks,
think to pick up, shovel
up, if possible: that is what
10is left: stuffing the central
experience into the peripheral
bit overinvests though &
creates aura,
wistfulness and small floating.
1970
Ground Tide
Headed back home from Harold’s, we came down
from some Connecticut hills, crossed the
height-slowed Hudson, mounted into the hills
again, the Catskills, made the divide and then
5picked up a stream that ironed out
in wandering descent as much as possible into
one grade—when we noticed the earth risen,
darkness of lofted hills, every one piled with
woods and possessed to the top, drowning
10us under the dark line of a weighty dominance:
nothing of the sort, of course! just fall-outs
of the ridge we’d already cleared, and so,
amiably, tilted by grade into a floating,
unearned speed, we eased on out into the open
15failing slopes, led by the spiritual, risen stream.
1970 (1971)
Translating
This afternoon the thunderstorms were separate and tall,
the intervals blue with clearing and white with icy
summits moiling upward till height could accept no
more and the vast glides called out evenness: so,
5through the afternoon there were several systems of
shower, the translations of heat vapor lofted to grit-ice,
the falling drafts of grit bounding, gathering into stones, the
further falls through the heavy warmer waters: at first, the drops
in any shower were huge, few, obviously stone water,
10then the narrower rods of slant-thick rain, then even
smaller rain, dense but fine with a half-light following or
a full breaking out of sun: then, it was, the sun come but
the rain not over, I saw under the aural boughs of the elm
the last translation, a fine-weaving gathered by leaves,
15augmented from tip to tip into big, lit, clear, sparse drops.
1970 (1971)
Sorting
There’s not much hill left up from here and after
rains runlets lose head quickly to the least
quiver: height has such poverty of
reservoir, and in a drought poplars will go
5brittle with yearning and take lightly their usual
mass and rock-hold, while at the bottom of the
ridge, the fountains will still be blinking,
the glade weeds rushed green: well, at least, we get
some view up here and sometimes breezes that miss
10the valley cut a high sweep across from ridge to ridge
and then most often the drought will break
in time, the trees come back, a branch or two burnished.
1970 (1971)
The Next Day
Morning glory vine
slight
as it is will
double on itself and
5pile over
a quince bush before
you know it:
so the woodless-stemmed
can
10by slender travel
arrange its leaves and
take away
light from the wooded:
beholding the rampancy
15and the
thin-leaved quince
thereunder, I stripped
off an armload
of vine
20and took it down to
the brushheap
under the pear tree:
the next day
the wilted leaves had
25given up their
moisture to the
vines that here and
there
to diminished glory
30lifted half-opened
morning glory blooms.
1970
Extremes and Moderations
Hurly-burly: taking on whatever is about to get off, up the
slack, ready with prompt-copy for the reiteration, electronic
to inspect the fuzzy-buffoon comeback, picking up the diverse
gravel of mellifluous banality, the world-replacing world
5world-irradiating, lesser than but more outspoken:
constructing the stanza is not in my case exceedingly
difficult, variably invariable, permitting maximum change
within maximum stability, the flow-breaking four-liner, lattice
of the satisfactory fall, grid seepage, currents distracted
10to side flow, multiple laterals that at some extreme spill
a shelf, ease back, hit the jolt of the central impulse: the
slow working-down of careful investigation, the run
diffused, swamped into variable action: my ideal’s a cold
clod clam calm, clam contained, nevertheless active in the
15digestion, capable of dietary mirth, the sudden whisk, nearly
rollably spherical: ah, but friends, to be turned
loose on an accurate impulse! how handsome the stanzas are
beginning to look, open to the total acceptance, fracturing into
delight, tugging down the broad sweep, thrashing it into
20particulars (within boundaries): diversity, however—as of
the concrete—is not ever-pleasing: I’ve seen fair mounds
of fine-stone at one end or the other of highway construction
many times and been chiefly interested in the “hill”: but
abstraction is the bogey-boo of those incapable of it, while,
25merrily, every abstractor brings the concrete up fine: one,
anyway, as Emerson says, does well what one settles down to:
it’s impossible anyone should know anything about the concrete
who’s never risen above it, above the myth of concretion
in the first place: pulverize such, unequal to the synthesis,
30the organism by which they move and breathe their particulars:
and the symbol won’t do, either: it differentiates flat
into muffling fact it tried to stabilize beyond: there aren’t
just problems for the mind, the mind’s problematic, residing
here by a scary shading merely: so much so it does seem
35at times to prefer an origin other-worldly, the dreaminess,
the surficial hanging-on, those interior swirls nearly
capable of another invention: astonishingly, the
celestial bodies are round, not square or triangular, not
dodecahedral, and then they are sprinkled in the void’s
40unusual abundance: if it weren’t for light, we wouldn’t think
anything here, that scanty a fabric: that is the way it
was made: worse, that is the way it works out: when the lady
said she accepted the universe, it was a sort of decision:
anyway, granted that the matter appears to be settled, there’s
but, now, a ghastly comfort: that’s the difference:
the first subject I wanted to introduce, because it’s
inanimate but highly active, is my marble garden bench down
by the elm—actually, well under the elm: it’s in three parts:
50the seat slab, four to five inches thick, and the two end slabs,
equally thick but, deeply buried, of undetermined length: I
bought this old place a few years ago, so wasn’t present for the
setting: but as to length the upper slab is, say, four feet:
some cool seeps up the legs from the ground, but I
55doubt there’s much commission between the legs and the upper
slab: cool nights deeply penetrate the bench, so that on
a flash-hot summer morning, the reservoir of dense cooling
will ooze right through to one’s bottom, providing, I must say,
a tendency to equilibrium: the stone never gets as hot as the
60day and never as cool as the night (maybe it’s colder some winter
nights of cold remembrances) so it moderates the environment,
working as a heater or air-conditioner: it has no moving
parts—it’s all moving parts, none visible—and yet is
capable of effect, animation: that such a thing can work for
65us day and night makes us feel, by cracky, that nature is our
servant, though without singular intention: the gift, though,
the abundance! we don’t have to pay for, that requires no