by A. R. Ammons
matching social security funds, no fringe benefits: the
unutterable avenue of bliss: in spite of the great many works
70in progress, I feel this is the last poem to the world: every
poet probably feels he is writing the last poem to the world:
man, in motion how avaricious, has by the exaggeration of his
refinement shown what intelligence can commit in the universe:
bleak scald of lakes, underground poisonous tides, air litter
75like a dusk, clouds not like the clouds: can we give our wild
life a brake: must we keep tinkering until a virus swerves
from our interventions into a genesis consummating us: must
we spew out acids till we’re their stew: lead on the highways,
washing into the grass, collecting into lead brooklets bound
80for diffusive destinations: get your musclebound mercury dose
here: come on, guys: we know how to handle the overpopulation
problem: sell folks carloads of improvement marked uncertain:
progress can be the end of us: how neat: in a way, you might
say, how right, how just, poetically just: but come on, I say,
85overrefined exaggeration, if you got us into this, can’t you
get us out: come on, hot-shot fusion: give us plenty with no
bitter aftertaste: paradise lies ahead, where it’s always lain:
but we may reach it, before hell overtakes us: nature, if I may
judge out a law, likes extremes, in some ways depends on them, but
90usually keeps them short or confined: if we are broadly, densely
extreme, can’t we count on the outbreak of dialectical alternatives:
we can count on it: what is a beer party now but a can of cans:
what is wine now but a bottle in a recalcitrant green glow,
empurpling in the sun: nevertheless, the petunias are incarnadine
95by the hedgebrush: nevertheless, the catbird comes to the plastic
boat the goldfish summers in, fools around looking, then takes
a drink: we are aided by much I will discuss and much as
yet unfixed: it’s time I introduced an extreme, but this time
I’m going to pick a moderate one, I think—the gusts before
100thunderstorms: now the gusts before thunderstorms are sometimes
high enough to trim trees: a bough summer has coaxed overweight,
that splitting riddance, serviceable enough, but more anthropo-
centrically, the shaking out of dead branches: when we are
out walking in the woods on a calm day, we don’t want a
105dead limb to just plunge out of a tree by surprise, striking us,
possibly, on the cranium: whatever we normally go to the woods
for, surely we don’t go for that: by high gusts thunderstorms
accomplish the possibility of calm residence: the tree, too,
counts on nodding times, sun-gleanings, free of astonishment,
110and to buy them is willing to give up its dead or
even its living limbs: nature gives much on occasion
but exacts a toll, a sacrifice: that puzzling suggestion,
or autumnal impulse, has accounted for much sacred carnage: I
hate to think of it: I nearly hate to think of it: the Maya
115hearts pulled out still flicking have always seemed to me gruesome
separations, attention-getting, but god-like with revulsion’s awe:
of course, even closer home, high gusts can carry hints to the
hapless by, for example, blowing down a fence obviously too weak
to stand: that should be good news to the farmer whose cows have
120been getting out: and who should not be alarmed by an immediate
problem if the lesson has been well bestowed: nature sometimes
gets all its shit together and lets you have it: but good farmers
make good fences and anybody else gets whatever the traffic will
bear away: I wrote the other day a poem on this subject:
125Ancestors
An elm tree, like a society or
culture, seems to behave out of
many actions toward a total
interest (namely, its own) which means
130that in the clutter and calamity
of days much, locally catastrophic,
can occur that brings no sharp
imbalance to the total register:
for example, dead limbs, white already
135with mold and brackets, can in
a high storm—the heralding windtwists
of thunderstorms, say—snap and, though
decay-light, plunge among the
lower greens, the many little stiff
140fingers entangling, weighing down
the structures of growth: ah, what
an insupportable extravagance by
the dead, held off the ground, leaching
white with slow, dry rot: what
145a duty for the young limbs, already
crowding and heavy with green: well,
I guess the elm is by that much local
waste wasted, but then perhaps its
sacrifice is to sway in some deep rich
150boughs the indifferent, superfluous,
recalcitrant, white, prophesying dead.
circulations are moderations, currents triggered by extremes:
we must at all costs keep the circulations free and clear,
open and unimpeded: otherwise, extremes will become trapped,
155local, locked in themselves, incapable of transaction: some
extremes, though, are circulations, a pity, in that kinds of
staying must then be the counters: for example, when in spring
a gray sandstorm arises over Indiana, circulation becomes
too free and open: hedgerows, even, are important at such times:
160they stall the storm just enough for heavy sand to fall out:
but what of the lengthy problem of small sand and, even worse,
of high-rising fine dust: if the storm hits
Pennsylvania, the woods will drag at its foot, then
tilt and capitulate it: heavy suspensions will lose their
165directions to gravity quickly but even the fine dust slowing will
sift through the equally numerical leaves, be caught by them,
and the air will be breatheable again by Jersey, west Jersey:
water’s carriages act the same way: high narrow valleys, roomless,
propel water along, loosening sometimes substantial boulders: the
170mature valleys, wide-bottomed, slow the flow, and
particulate weight falls out: in the ancient flat valleys,
where meanders have cut off into oxbow lakes or little crescents
of difference, the water goes broad and slow and only the
fine stuff in a colloidal float, a high drift, stays out
175the ride, hanging finally in long curtains in the gulfs and lagoons:
well, I just, for poetic purposes, wanted to point out the parallel:
parallel too in that even Pennsylvania can’t get some of the
high dust, the microscopic grit—settles out with the
floating spiders on Atlantic isles and (too bad for the spiders)
180waves: such circulations are average and quite precious: the
sun’s the motor, the mechanisms greased by millions of years
of propriety and correction: the place produced deliciously
habitable, a place we found we could grow into: how marvelous!
lightning is one of the finest, sharpest tensions, energy
185concentrations: it has to be lean because it leaps far:
how was the separation to be bridged, the charge neutralized,
except by a high-energy construct: gathers the
diffuse
energy from clouds and ground and drains it through a
dense crackling: I don’t know how it works: it works:
190the charges rush together and annihilate each other:
or the charge goes one way, to the ground, or to the
clouds: I’ll bet it’s one way and to the ground: the
lofted’s precarious: the ground is nice and sweet and not
at all spectacular: I wonder if I’m really talking about
195the economy of the self, where an extreme can gather up a lot
of stale stuff and mobilize it, immoderate grief,
or racing terror, or a big unification like love chugging
up to the fold: we never talk about anything but ourselves,
objectivity the objective way of talking about ourselves:
200O calligraphers, blue swallows, filigree the world
with figure, bring the reductions, the snakes unwinding,
the loops, tendrils, attachments, turn in necessity’s precision,
give us the highwire of the essential, the slippery concisions
of tense attentions! go to look for the ocean currents and
205though they are always flowing there they are, right in place, if
with seasonal leans and sways: the human body
staying in change, time rushing through, ingestion,
elimination: if change stopped, the mechanisms of
holding would lose their tune: current informs us,
210is the means of our temporary stay: ice water at the northern
circle sinks and in a high wall like a glacier seeps down the
ocean bottom south: but the south’s surface water is going
north, often in spiral carriages of an extreme intensity, nevertheless
moderating, preventing worse extremes: as when snow streaks up the
215summit, up past the timberline where interference is slight, and
having passed the concision of the ridge, blooms out diffusing
over the valley, drifts out into the catchments, fills with
feathery loads the high ravines, the glacier’s compressions forming
underneath, taking direction in the slowest flow of relief, so on
220any number of other occasions, massive collections and dispositions
restore ends to sources: O city, I cry at
the gate, the glacier is your
mother, the currents of the deep father you, you sleep
in the ministry of trees, the boulders are your brothers sustaining
225you: come out, I cry, into the lofty assimilations: women, let
down your hair under the dark leaves of the night grove, enter
the currents with a sage whining, rising into the circular
dance: men, come out and be with the wind, speedy and lean, fall
into the moon-cheered waters, plunge into the ecstasy of rapids:
230children, come out and play in the toys of divinity: glass, brick,
stone, curb, rail are freezing you out of your motions, the
uncluttered circulations: I cry that, but perhaps I am too secular
or pagan: everything, they say, is artificial: nature’s the
artwork of the Lord: but your work, city, is aimed unnaturally
235against time: your artifice confronts the Artifice: beyond
the scheduled consummation, nothing’s to be recalled: there is
memory enough in the rock, unscriptured history in
the wind, sufficient identity in the curve
of the valley: what is your name, city, under your name: who
240are your people under their faces: children of the light,
children of the light: of seasons, moons, apples, berries,
grain: children of flies, worms, stars: come out, I cry, into
your parentage, your established natures: I went out and pulled a
few weeds in the lawn: you probably think I was getting goofy
245or scared: it was just another show: as the mystic said, it’s
all one to me: then I went on over to the University, and there
was Slatoff’s new book, fresh from the publisher’s: and Kaske
had left me a book he’d told me about: Ballad of the Bones
and Other Poems, by Byron Herbert Reece: E.P. Dutton: 1945:
250$2.00: introduced by Jesse Stuart: and praised, on
the back cover, by William Rose Benet, John Hall Wheelock,
John Gould Fletcher, and Alfred Kreymborg: I do believe I’m going
to enjoy the book: the South has Mr. Reece and, probably,
Literature: I bet I pulled a thousand weeds: harkweed’s
255incredible: it puts up a flower (beautiful) to seed but at the
same time sends out runners under the grass that anchor a few
inches or a foot away, and then the leaves of the new plants
press away the grass in a tight fit: I put havoc into those
progressions, believe me: plants take their cue and shape
260from crowding: they will crowd anything, including close
relatives, brethren and sistren: everybody, if I may switch
tracks, is out to get his: that is the energy we must allow
the widest margin to: and let the margins, then, collide into
sensible adjustments: slow moderations are usually massive:
265nature can’t heave a lot fast, air and
oceans reasonably unwieldy: true, they work into lesser
intensities, local: maelstroms, typhoons, fairly rapid highs
or lows, the boiling up of deep, cold water: dimension may be
the sorter, although it didn’t seem so originally with the
270garden bench, small and yet efficiently moderating: if
you built a wall across the Gulf Stream, though, the sundering
would be lengthy: and what would it take to bring about a quick
thermal change in an ocean: a solar burst; at least,
unusual effusion: quantity of mass or number (as of leaves) then
275moderates the local effect: as for cooling an ocean, a lot of
icebergs would have to split off from the caps and plunge before
the change would be measurable: expanded, though, through
sufficient time—a massiveness—the lesser effects could assume
large implications: but, of course, with the icebergs, one
280would have to investigate the mechanisms that were heating up the
general air, causing the splits in the first place, and then one
would have to deal with the probability that the air, massive to
massive, would warm up the oceans which would then be able to
absorb large numbers of icebergs without cooling: I suppose
285my confusion is no more than natural, reflecting
the reticulation of interpenetration in nature, whereby we should
be advised to tamper cautiously with least balances,
lest a considerable number, a series or so, tilt
akimbo: even now, though, we apparently cannot let well enough
290alone: how well it was! how computer-like in billionths the
administration and take of the cure: just think, the best cure
would arise by subtle influence of itself if only we would
disappear: but though we have scalded and oiled the seas and
scabbed the land and smoked the mirror of heaven, we must try
295to stay and keep those who are alive alive: then we
might propose to ourselves that collectively we have one grain
of sense and see what the proposition summons forth: the force of
the drive by which we have survived is hard to counter, even
now that we survive so densely: and it is not certain the plants
300would not lose their shape and vigor if they had to stop
crowding: a ve
ry hard reversal and loss of impetus: we may
have time to diminish and cope with our thrust: the little patch
of wildwoods out behind my backhedge is even now squeaky and
chirpy with birds and the day is as clear as a missing windowpane:
305the clouds are few, large, and vastly white: the air has no
smell and the shade of trees is sharp: floods are extreme
by narrowing rain, which can, itself, be quite bountiful:
it’s hard to blame floods—useless—because they’re just
showing how hard they can work to drain the land:
310one way a slow impulse works up into an extremity’s
the earthquake: coastal land, say, drifts with sea currents
north a couple of inches a year, setting up a strain along a
line with the land’s land: at some point, tension gives in
a wrack and wrecks stability, restoring lassitude: or resonance
315of circulation coming into a twist or “beat”: the gathering up,
the event, the dissipation: but that would imply that everything,
massive, slow, or long is moving toward the enunciation of
an extreme: we dwell in peace on the post-tables and
shelves of these remarkable statements: what kind of lurch is
320it, I wonder, when a comet sideswipes us, or swishes by near
enough to switch our magnetic poles: can the atmosphere
be shifted a few hundred miles: the oceans
would pile up and spill: maybe just the magnetic poles would
switch, that sounds all right: but if the comet hit us and
325glanced off or even stuck, its impact would affect
our angular momentum and possibly put some wobble in our motion:
somebody said the purpose of science is to put us in control