by A. R. Ammons
of our environment, allaying calamity and catastrophe, though
conceivably also making nice days a little nicer: well, all
330I say (figuratively speaking) is a lot of things are
still in their own control: maybe my point, though, is that
by and large I prefer the other controls to our own, not
forsaking the possibility that still larger controls
by us might bring about a fair, if slightly artificialized,
335paradise someday: from here, it looks like ruin and
destruction either way, more or less: one thing we will never
do is sit around on this planet doing nothing, just soaking
up the honey of solar radiation: if our problems were
solved, we’d go out of business: (stretch that a little
340and it will do): it’s dry: the weeds in the lawn
are being tested to the limit, some having died: I’ve just
put a soakhose by the maple: I’ll let it go slowly that way
for a few hours: the grass in patches is parched tan:
it crackles underfoot: tight spurs of hay:
345I didn’t see the hornet at first when I went to attach the
hose: he was sucking the spigot: people around here don’t
have sprinklers, I can’t understand it: I always used to have
one in South Jersey: maybe water’s expensive or maybe
very dry spells are rare: seems to me I remember a very dry
350one last year: the days are shortening: it’s sundown
now at eight: maybe a little later officially, but the sun’s
down behind the ridge on the other side of the lake by then: any
night could turn sharp cold—read August 21: I’ve been at this
poem or prose-poem or versification or diversification for three
355or four days: I’ll never get all the weeds
out of the grass: I just know after each day that
there are a hell of a lot fewer weeds in the lawn:
it’s evening: seven: I just noticed
a dark cloud coming from the west, so I went out
360and said, please, rain some here: a few pin drops
fell, I think though more because of the dark cloud than the
saying: saying doesn’t do any good but it doesn’t
hurt: aligns the psychic forces with the natural:
that alignment may have some influence: I have found the world
365so marvelous that nothing would surprise me: that may sound
contradictory, the wrong way to reach the matter-of-fact: but
if you can buy comets sizzling around in super-elongated
orbits and a mathematics risen in man that corresponds to the
orbits, why, simple as it is finally, you can move on to glutinous
370molecules sloshing around in the fallen seas for something
to stick to: that there should have been possibilities enough to
include all that has occurred is beyond belief, an extreme the
strictures and disciplines of which prevent loose-flowing
phantasmagoria: last night in the cloud-darkened dusk rain began
375gently, the air so full of moisture it just couldn’t help it,
and continued at least past midnight when I went to bed: this
morning is dark but not raining: recovery’s widespread: rain
comes all over everything: trees, bushes, beans, petunias,
weeds, grass, sandboxes, garages: yesterday I went with the hose
380on the hard crusty ground from one single scorched patch to
another, never able to stay long at one point the other places
were calling so hard: ocean dumping of nuclear garbage requires
technological know-how, precision of intention, grace of
manipulation: devilish competition invades even the dirty work
385of the world, where, though, the aggressive, intelligent young man
can negotiate spectacular levels of promotion: we have spilt
much energy generating concentrations—nerve gas, specific
insecticides, car polish, household cleansers “fatal if swallowed”—
we must depend on land, sea, and air to diffuse into harmlessness:
390but some indestructibles resist all transformation and anyway
our vast moderators are limited: an oil slick covers every inch
of ocean surface: at the poles pilots see in the contrast the
sullied air’s worldwide: because of the circulations, water can
never be picked up for use except from its usages, where what
395has gone in is not measured or determined: extreme calls to
extreme and moderation is losing its quality, its effect: the
artificial has taken on the complication of the natural and where
to take hold, how to let go, perplexes individual action: ruin
and gloom are falling off the shoulders of progress: blue-green
400globe, we have tripped your balance and gone into exaggerated
possession: this seems to me the last poem written to the world
before its freshness capsizes and sinks into the slush: the
rampaging industrialists, the chemical devisers and manipulators
are forging tanks, filling vats of smoky horrors because of
405dollar lust, so as to live in long white houses on the summits
of lengthy slopes, for the pleasures of making others spur and
turn: but common air moves over the slopes, and common rain’s
losing its heavenly clarity: if we move beyond
the natural cautions, we must pay the natural costs, our every
410extreme played out: where we can’t create the room of
playing out, we must avoid the extreme, disallow it: it’s Sunday
morning accounts for such preachments, exhortations, and
solemnities: the cumulative vent of our primal energies is now and
always has been sufficient to blow us up: I have my ventilator
415here, my interminable stanza, my lattice work that lets the world
breeze unobstructed through: we could use more such harmless
devices: sex is a circular closure, permitting spheric
circularity above hemispheric exchange: innocent, non-destructive,
illimitable (don’t you wish it) vent: I want to close (I may
420interminably do it, because a flatness is without beginning,
development, or end) with my chief concern: if contaminated
water forces me to the extreme purification of bottled or distilled
water, the extreme will be costly: bulldozers will have to clear
roads to the springs: trucks will have to muck the air to bring
425the water down: bottles will have to be made from oil-fired
melts: a secondary level of filth created to escape the first:
in an enclosure like earth’s there’s no place to dump stuff off.
1970
Mid-August
Now the ridge
brooks
are
flue-dry, the rocks
5parching hot &
where sluice
used
to clear roots &
break weeds down brambly,
10light finds a luminous
sand-scar,
vertical: it will
go to a hundred
today: even the
15zucchini vine has
rolled over
on its
side.
1970 (1972)
Clearing the Dark Symbiosis
Any entangling however
scandent and weighty
is likely
if it’s lasted some eons
5to show mutuality, fervor
symbiotic, if
in the first trials
for example, the hollyhocks
10strung out tall,
the peaks heavy with
bud-nub and bloom sway,
I started to look out thinking
thunder, thunder-made or making
15wind, would down
those highest blooms, or
rain and wind would: but
the morning glory vines,
taking over like sudden guests,
20built a holding between
all the hollyhock stalks,
a mutual house, an air house:
the storm came, well you know,
but the vines were just
25sufficient to keep the margin of
extremity off: I said
well in the fall (almost)
when the
hollyhock has very little
30to lose, it has still itself
to gain: add, for me,
the morning glory blooms.
1970
Viable
Motion’s the dead give away,
eye catcher, the revealing risk:
the caterpillar sulls on the hot macadam
but then, risking, ripples to the bush:
5the cricket, startled, leaps the
quickest arc: the earthworm, casting,
nudges a grassblade, and the sharp robin
strikes: sound’s the other
announcement: the redbird lands in
10an elm branch and tests the air with
cheeps for an answering, reassuring
cheep, for a motion already cleared:
survival organizes these means down to
tension, to enwrapped, twisting suasions:
15every act or non-act enceinte with risk or
prize: why must the revelations be
sound and motion, the poet, too, moving and
saying through the scary opposites to death.
1970
Precursors
In a little off-water
snaggy with roots
I dibbled
thinking
5what a brand new place this is—
the surprising fauna,
scribblings
scribbling in water, landing
in mud-dust,
10the spectacular green moss
creeping down
stump slopes to waterlevel,
and, look, clouds appear
in the ground
15here, puddles
perfectly representational,
giving day or night
totally back:
it was so new
20I thought I must’ve invented
it, or at least said it
first into the air:
but when I looked around
there were a thousand
25puddles—had been
thousands more—some larger
than mine
in an over-place
called a swamp:
30over-place led on to over-place
to the one place where
invisibility broke
out vacancy’s flawless opacity:
but there, so the story
35end good,
a turn brought me back
to this particular old
dawdling hole,
the wonders greener than they were,
40the mirror clearer,
the fauna (and flora)
diverser, tangled,
the oldest things freshest,
most in need of being told.
1970
Lonesome Valley
This time of year a bumblebee’s
sometimes found off
well away from anywhere
with a ragged wing:
5seems foreign, probably, to him,
once a smooth bullet shot clear over
untroubling shrubs,
the difficulty of giving
grass and tiny, spangling
10clover leaves:
as if from anger, a very high blurred buzz
comes and the bee lofts
three inches off, falls one-sided,
perplexed in a perfect scramble
15of concretion—
immense vines & stalks brushy
interweaving—
frost’s the solution still
distant
20but too much effort in the crippled
condition can
do it too
or being dragged down by ants,
the sucked dryness,
25the glassy wings perfectly remnant
in their raggedness,
the body shell shellacked complete,
the excessive hollowness and lightness.
1970
Delaware Water Gap
Rounding the mountain’s rim-ledge,
we looked out valleyward
onto the summits of lesser hills,
summits bottoms of held air, still lesser
5heights clefts and ravines: oh, I said,
the land’s a slow ocean, the long blue
ridge a reared breakage, these small peaks
dips and rises: we’re floating,
I said, intermediates of stone and air,
10and nothing has slowed altogether
into determination and a new wave
to finish this one is building up somewhere,
a continent crowded loose, upwarping
against its suasions, we, you and I,
15to be drowned, now so sustained and free.
1970 (1971)
Day
On a cold late
September morning,
wider than sky-wide
discs of lit-shale clouds
5skim the hills,
crescents, chords
of sunlight
now and then fracturing
the long peripheries:
10the crow flies
silent,
on course but destinationless,
floating:
hurry, hurry,
15the running light says,
while anything remains.
1970 (1971)
Staking Claim
Look, look where the mind can go
I said to the sanctified
willows
wreathing jittery slow slopes of wind
5look it can go up up to the ultimate
node where
remembering is foretelling
generation, closure
where taking in is giving out
10ascent and descent a common blip
look going like wind over rocks
it can
touch where
completion is cancellation
15all the way to the final vacant core
that brings
things together and turns them away
all the way away
to stirless bliss!
20and the willows,
dream-wraiths song-turned,
bent in troops of unanimity,
never could waken
never could feel the rushing days
25never could feel the cold
wind and rushing days
or thoroughly know
their leaves taking flight:
look I said to the willows
30what the mind
can apprehend,
entire and perfect staying,
and yet face winter’s
face coming over the hill
35look I said to the leaves
breaking into flocks around me taking
my voice away
to the far side of the hill
and way beyond gusting down the long changes
1970
The Eternal City
After the explosion or cataclysm, that big
display that does its work but then fails
out with destructions, one is left with the
pieces: at first, they
don’t look very valuable,
5but nothing sizable remnant around for
gathering the senses on, one begins to take
an interest, to sort out, to consider closely
what will do and won’t, matters having become
not only small but critical: bulbs may have been
10uprooted: they should be eaten, if edible, or
got back in the ground: what used to be garages,
even the splinters, should be collected for
fires: some unusually deep holes or cleared
woods may be turned to water supplies or
15sudden fields: ruinage is hardly ever a
pretty sight but it must when splendor goes
accept into itself piece by piece all the old
perfect human visions, all the old perfect loves.
1970 (1971)
The Shoreless Tide
The universe with its
universal principles
was out exact with concision—
but toying, idling—
5again this morning: that
is, the lemon-yellow
lime-veined sugar maple
leaves were as in a
morning tide, full but
10slow with the slowness
of huge presences, nicking
off the branches and
coming down points up, stem-end
first, centered and weighted,
15but spiraling nicely,
a dance perfectly
abundant: I got excited,