The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1

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