The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1
Page 46
the universe concentrated
on the small scope of
20a fall, as if to
expend reserves of
spectacle on the doomed so
we might, I thought, consider
some well beyond all loss.
1970
Grace Abounding
for E.C.
What is the misery in one that turns one with gladness
to the hedge strung lucid with ice: is it that one’s
misery, penetrating there as sight, meets neither
welcome nor reprimand but finds nevertheless a picture
5of itself sympathetic, held as the ice-blurred stems
increased: ah, what an abundance is in the universe
when one can go for gladness to the indifferent ghastly,
feel alliances where none may ever take: find one’s
misery made clear, borne, as if also, by a hedge of ice.
1970 (1972)
Phase
These still days after frost have let down
the maple leaves in a straight compression
to the grass, a slight wobble from circular to
the east, as if sometime, probably at night, the
5wind’s moved that way—surely, nothing else
could have done it, really eliminating the as
if, although the as if can nearly stay since
the wind may have been a big, slow
one, imperceptible, but still angling
10off the perpendicular the leaves’ fall:
anyway, there was the green-ribbed, yellow,
flat-open reduction: I just now bagged it up.
1970
Hibernaculum
1
A cud’s a locus in time, a staying change, moving
but holding through motions timeless relations,
as of center to periphery, core-thought to consideration,
not especially, I’d say, goal-directed, more
5a slime- and sublime-filled coasting, a repeating of
gently repeating motions, blissful slobber-spun webs:
today’s paper says that rain falls on the desert and makes
it fertile: semen slips, jets, swims into wombs
and makes them bulge: therefore, there must be
2
10a big penis above the clouds that spills the rain:
that is, I think, reasonable, which says something for
reason operating in fictions akilter: reason’s no
better off than its ambience, and an ambience can’t
alter frequently from its reason: (somewhere, though,
15along the arm of a backwoods spiral, interchange
and adjustment with the environment are possible but
adjustment likely to be at the surprise of reason,
displeasure included: but then there has to be
3
protection against jolt-change: smashing alterations,
20kind of cottonpicking conniptions, fail of impulse:)
the thunderbolt, another celestial phallus, though
sterile, peels trees, explodes bushes, ravels roots,
melds sand into imitation lightning, spurry and branchy,
deep into the ground: that sort of thing is
25not promising, so represents, as with Zeus, authority:
cussed superegomaniacal threat that gets from the outside
in, doing its dirty work bitterest closest to
4
pleasure’s fundament: the better it feels, the bigger
the bludgeon: O merciful constructions that are so made,
30do have mercy: the stuff is sweet, why crud it up
with crud: for every fructifying heavenly penis, such as
the rain penis, a ghastly one seres sand:
if there were any way to get around the universe, somebody
would’ve by now: history informs despair:
35the lucky young, they don’t know anybody’s screwed
or perished before: just as well, too: although
5
screwing is nearly worth perishing, and, too, the two not
always concomitant: perhaps, co-terminous: but then the
penis is also (like the heavens) splitting and pleasuring:
while it’s in, it is, afterall, commanding and will not,
just because somebody’s edgy, withdraw: it will come
out only when it backs off from a puzzled loss or when
something truly spectacular appears, a shotgun or, more
accurately, roused maiden aunt: rhythms, speeding up,
45build necessity into their programs: I see filigrees of
6
confabulation, curlicues, the salt walking-bush, ah, I see
aggregates of definition, plausible emergences, I see
reticulations of ambience: the days shorten down to a
gap in the night, winter, though gray and vague, not half
50dubious enough: I see a sleet-filled sky’s dry freeze:
I see diggings disheveled, bleak mounds, burnt openings:
what do I see: I see a world made, unmade, and made again
and I hear crying either way: I look to the ground for the
lost, the ground’s lost: I see grime, just grime, grain,
7
55grit, grist: the layers at thousand-year intervals
accumulate, reduce to beginnings: but I see the nightwatchman
at the cave’s mouth, his eyes turned up in stunned amusement
to the constellations: from zero to zero we
pass through magnificence too shatterable: sight, touch,
60inquiring tongue, water spinning into white threads over rocks:
I see the man moving boldly, staking his love on time, time
the slippery, the slick mound stragglers slide into the
everlasting encompassing waters from: not a drop of water
8
hasn’t endured the salt-change of change: how
65have the clouds kept fresh, the soil kept lively, its
milling microbes, how has the air, drawn into numberless
dyings kept clarity, breatheability: I see quiet lakes
and composed hills: I see the seasonal wash of
white and green: I am alarmed with acceptance: nothing
70made right could have been made this way, and nothing
made otherwise could have been made right: nothing can
be made to make it right: we’re given the works to
9
purchase nothing: the hardest training of the eye
against this loveliness, what can we make of holding so
75to what we must give up, as if only in the act of giving
up can we know the magnificence, spent: what are we
here to learn: how to come into our estates before night
disinherits us: dear God (or whatever, if anything, is
merciful) give us our lives, then, the full possession,
80before we give them back: I see the flood-child astir in the
surf, the clouds slowing and breaking into light:
10
what did he buy or sell: what is the meaning of loss
that never lived into gain: the mother, not far off,
flickers in a ditch to the minor winds: how far off
85she is, past all touch and dream, the child huddled
snug into himself, his decomposition: how the dark
mind feeds on darkness, hungry for the inmost core: but
it is only darkness, empty, the hollow, the black, sucking
wind: this everyone knows: everyone turns away: light,
90tendril, moon, water seize our attention, make us turn:
11
I think we are here to give back our possessions before
they are taken away: with deliberate mind to say to
the crushing love, I am aware you are here cloaked in
&nbs
p; this moment, you are priceless, eternity is between us,
95we offer ourselves in the sacrifice of time to this
moment become unconditioned and time-evering: I think
we are here to draw the furthest tailing of time round
into the perishing of this purest instant: to make out
the proximity of love to a hundred percent and to zero:
12
100I see the bitterest acquiescence, the calm eye in the
tragic scene, the smile of the howling mind: I keep
forgetting—I am not to be saved: I keep forgetting this
translation from fleshbody to wordbody is leaving my
flesh behind, that I have entered into the wordbody but
105may not enter in, not at last: I need a set of practices,
a mnemonics, my fleshbody can keep close to its going:
of those practices the stepping out into love, motion’s
glimpse, blanches to the highest burn: I can lose myself:
13
I’m not so certain I can lose you, I’m not so certain
110you can lose me: but all the others have succeeded, all
the others have tricked on their legs by graves, all
the others have gotten through all the losses and left
the air clear, the bush aleaf, the ground in scent:
after it takes place, there will be a clearing for us,
115too, we will be in the wind what shape a leaf would take
if a leaf were there: let’s join to the deepest slowing,
turn the deepest dark into touch, gape, pumping, at the
14
dark beyond reach: afterwards, shoveling the driveway,
warming up the coffee, going to the grocery store, opening
120the cookie jar, washing, shaving, vacuuming, looking out
the window at the perilously afflicted, that is, snow-loaded
bent evergreens, watching the pheasants walking across
the yard, plopping up belly-deep in snow, wondering
if one can get the car out or, out, in: the Ceremony of
125Puzzling over the Typewriter, of swishing off the dishes
and getting them in the washer, of taking out the trash
15
and hearing the trash-can lids snap and bang, opened or
squeezed shut: the considerable distance the universe
allows between brushing the teeth and helping John put
130his fort together: these small actions near the center
form the integrations, the gestures and melodies, rises
and falls minutes give over to hours, hours to days, days
to weeks, months, and years: it all adds up to zero only
because each filled day is shut away, vanished: and what
135memory keeps it keeps in a lost paradise: the heroic
16
entangler, benign arachnid, casting threads to catch,
hang and snatch, draw up the filamental clutch, the
clump-core reticulate, to tie energy into verbal knots
so that only with the death of language dies the energy!
140so all the unravellers may feed! the dissipators go with
some grain to their swill: pleasure to my tribe and
sufficient honor! to lean belief the lean word comes,
each scope adjusted to the plausible: to the heart
emptied of, by elimination, the world, comes the small
17
145cry domesticating the night: if the night is to be
habitable, if dawn is to come out of it, if day is ever
to grow brilliant on delivered populations, the word
must have its way by the brook, lie out cold all night
along the snow limb, spell by yearning’s wilted weed till
150the wilted weed rises, know the patience and smallness
of stones: I address the empty place where the god
that has been deposed lived: it is the godhead: the
yearnings that have been addressed to it bear antiquity’s
18
sanction: for the god is ever re-created as
155emptiness, till force and ritual fill up and strangle
his life, and then he must be born empty again: I
accost the emptiness saying let all men turn their
eyes to the emptiness that allows adoration’s life:
that is my whole saying, though I have no intention to
160stop talking: our immediate staying’s the rock but
the staying of the rock’s motion: motion, that spirit!
we could veer into, dimpling, the sun or into the cold
19
orbital lofts, but our motion, our weight, our speed
are organized here like a rock, our spiritual stay:
165the blue spruce’s become ponderous with snow: brief
melt re-froze and knitted ice to needles and ice
to snow so the ridges eight inches high hold: the
branches move back and forth, stiff wailers:
the cloud-misty moonlight fills small fields, plots,
170woodnooks with high light, snow transluminant as
fire: the owl, I’ll bet, looks about little from
20
those branchy margins, his eye cleaned of liking in
the soft waste not a mouse burrows or thrashes through,
liking gone inward and sharp into the agony of imagined
175mouseful lands: one thing poetry could be resembled to is
soup: the high moving into clarity of quintessential
consommé: then broth, the homogeneous cast of substance’s
shadow: then the falling out of diversity into specific
identity, carrot cube, pea, rice grain: then the chunky
180predominance of beef hunk, long bean, in heavy gravy:
21
last night the eaves from roof heat dripped and the
drops in those close-holding freezing laminations
noded the tips of the cedar lobes hammer heavy, such
ice: today, though, some sunshine and in the mid-forties,
185the freeing up has been steady, if slow: the blue
spruce stands isolated out in the yard—nothing drips
on it except the sky—and since mid-morning it has
had a little melt-shower in it, a shower canopy:
from a low-hung dangle the emptied branches have risen
22
190to near horizontal and the snow left looks edged and
drained: I think in the marked up annals of recorded
evolutionary history mind will turn out to have been
nova-like, say; a pressure of chance built up
nature had to take, the slide toward the slow explosion
195of searching risk: some think mind will continue
growing out of nature until possessed of its own self
second-nature it will bespeak its own change, turn with
or against the loam out of which it grew: I’m pessimistic:
23
for my little faith, such as it is, is that mind and
200nature grew out of a common node and so must obey common
motions, so that dickering with second-nature mind
violates the violation: a made mind can live compre-
hendingly only in a made world and artifice, exact and
independent as it looks, can’t, I’ll bet, extend intricacy
205working out through the core of every single atom: I
depend on the brook to look out where it’s going:
I depend on the snow to ornament the woods: I depend
24
on the sun to get up every morning rightfully off-time:
I depend on the sea current to find just which way to
210sway to the thermodynamic necessity: I depend utterly
on my body to produce me, keep me produced, don’t you:<
br />
the autonomy of the mind! who could desire it, staying
up all night to keep the liver right, the pancreas calm:
I prefer like the sweet brook to be at ease with my
215findings: I prefer the strictures that release me into
motion: for not even the highest branch is free to wave,
25
it responds as freedom to the wind’s tyranny: what have
I to desire of autonomy except slavery, its ware:
I prefer to be offered up by all the designs and musculatures
220into the liberty of correspondent motions: when the
mind can sustain itself it then may consider sustaining
the universe: meanwhile, I have nothing, nothing to sell:
I write what is left to write after everything’s sold out:
and also I write not very wide, just to the fence or hedge
225around the lot (sometimes from my window I take in the
26
neighboring lady’s scrap of woods—I hope she
doesn’t get word and charge me) but of course I write
straight up and down as far either way as I can reach,
which by sight (but not reach) one way is far but by
230reach the other way, the ground, is near, if so opaque
only imagination, that frail, filters through: still