The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1
Page 47
it’s world enough to take my time, stretch my reason, hinder
and free me: do a section on the garage roof snow and you
will find several strata: I haven’t looked but I know
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235because I was here when they happened: fluff snow, grit
snow, plain sleet, fluff snow, wet snow, more grit, and
snow (regular): similar sedimentary phenomena might be
expected elsewhere: and I have sat here by the window today
and seen a direct relation between the sunny intervals and
240the rate of eave-melt off the garage: that close a
pull between the sun and my garage snow stuns me,
though I would be the last to insist it do a thing for you:
I really do not want to convince anyone of anything except
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that conviction is cut loose, adrift and aswim, upon the
245cool (sometimes sweltering) tides of roiling energy:
that’s not to despise conviction, definition, or other
structure but to put them in their place: I hope
you are in the middle income bracket (at least): I
desire to be in the very high upper high outgo bracket:
250to furnish forth energy out of nothing, except reflection,
a few hard years, several procedures of terror and
astonishment, New Hope Elementary School, assorted
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mothers and fathers (with the one and the one), fifty
acres of ground, half swamp, half hill, Whiteville High
255School, the Pacific Ocean, a small sweep through the arc
of the galaxy, one arm of the spiral in particular,
etc.: I know I can’t give all that back but so what I
haven’t quit trying yet and anyway it’s just giving
nothing to nothing: I’m somewhat shocked by clouds
260of organic compounds in deep space but anticipate
no flagrant reaction: I think it’s going to rain:
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our young don’t believe in time as future and, so,
suffer every instant’s death: they don’t believe
in the thread, plot, the leading of one thing into
265another, consequence, developed change: without retrospect
or prospect, they seek the quality of experience
a moment’s dimension allows: thrill replaces
goal: threat lessens and fractures time, shortening
the distance to the abyss, immediate, a step away:
270without calm, they can’t see tomorrow unfolding: the mind,
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too, can’t move beyond the surface event into the
assimilations of higher, restful suasions where arc-like
staying has beginning and end and smooth curvature
reliable: hell is the meaninglessness of stringing out
275events in unrelated, undirected sequences: remove danger
(holocaust, suffocation, poisoning) from the young and
their anxieties will unwind into long reaches of easeful
seeking: not that anyone is, has been, or ever will be
more than a hair away from disaster, and the statistics
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280on anyone’s living forever are unpromising: still,
we have now a Myth of Disaster, and that’s harder than
some other kinds of myth: with another snow coming, we
drove out past Route 13 on North Hanshaw this afternoon
to the tree farm for a scotch pine: there was half an
285acre of perfectly spaced trees tied up to permanent
stakes: that was enough, some of the stakes deserted:
nevertheless, I bought a full, short, four-dollar tree
which I’ve just put twinkle lights on: now, with
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the snow still steady, John and Robbie (his little
290friend) are doing their part, hanging balls and
icicles: Christmas is still five days away, but no
matter—anticipation starts to burst out of little boys
early, and a present to raising the tree must be opened:
vent, vent: we need every trigger and valve we can
295invent to achieve restless deflations: invent vents:
my enormous, airy self sputters like a balloon at its
inadequate outlet and shoots off spinning enlarging circles
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into the galaxy—or at least over the fence and treetops or
halfway over the lake: when it gets too dry around here
300in the summer sometimes, the little creeks nearly creak
with drought, a dribble of a drop dropping off the
dry ledges: well, I could use a little of that spareness
of form and volume: imagine the luxurious lassitude of
taking five minutes to swell into a drop and then let
305go with a lengthy reluctance: the last drop bulbing
from the spent member: but little boys have small
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emotional bladders and the pressure’s terrific: they’d
rather have a string of little wows every day
than build up to one big blast: I see the gully-wash,
310lineated at the bottom with every stone the flash
could reach and roll into marcation: the honeybee sings
by the hard cactus, wings, spines, works his way up to
the barrel-tip blossom wet, resilient with the roothair
aperture of giving: somewhere in a dry trunk, the grog-rich
315honey cushioning the beeswax: I see the industry of water
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variously dense and laden, the distributions, the little
pools, saved lockets: the bead in the ant belly,
the thread in a cactus vein, the reservoirs of birds’
eyes: the droplet concentrations: I keep thinking
320I’m saved, a shock of mild hilarity! I keep thinking
I’m a pot eternity is dropping coins in! think,
if you will, of that: or I keep thinking these words
translate me into another body less affected by
the weather and time’s clicking subtractions:
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325public, I have nothing to say to you, nothing: except,
look at the caterpillar under this clump of grass: it
is fuzzy: look at the sunset: it is colorful: listen:
it’s hard to compete here in winter: snow makes the
broadest impression, an ineradicable eradication: slows
330and muffles: you can hear the snow fall, a fizz: if
I cannot look at you, I can look with you: since there
is something between us, let it be a thing we share:
if there is nothing between us, I’m coming up with this:
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by the time I got the world cut down small enough that
335I could be the center of it, it wasn’t worth having:
but when I gave up center, I found I was peripherally
no bigger than a bit: now, I have decided the former
was the better: I must re-mount the center and force
the world to subside about me: not easy and not
340promising, but neither is surrender: still, St. Francis
said if you give up everything it’s all yours: giving
up is not easy at all: why is everything so perplexing:
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I feel in the company of the soul, however, nervous:
I grow arch and curt: I talk nasty: I wink and grunt or
345switch to salacity: I mouth reprovables: I don’t
belong here, I try to announce: I am not worthy: I say
to the soul, you know this is no place for me: I am,
besides impolite, flawed: but the soul absorbs my defense
and turns my pain into a pure form of itself, investi
ng
350my embarrassment with grace: I go out to the hedge bush-vine,
but there is the soul, tangled with curvature: I look at
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the gaunt maple, but a nest is hung in it: I look
at the points of the picket fence, but there, too, the
snowflakes hold: in between, thinner than sight,
355returns and compliances give and take: can I take this
in, I ask, stand with it, assume it: can I talk of it just
as it stalls against the garage, bends upward and outward
around the eaves, picks up a drift and walks it to the edge:
is there an accepting it so complete it vanishes, my wills
360and motions tidings in a tide: ah, soul, I say,
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awkwardness is being conscious of you: I will move and
do directly as I like and that way correspond to your
liking: the point is just to get this page full so I can
take it out of the typewriter and write some letters: sour
365cream, yogurt, cottage cheese, chip dip: lizard,
lick-flicking: rancher, ranching: fly, buzzing: tiger,
hassling: cicada, burr-grinding: squirrel, leaping:
chicken, walking: fur, flying: day, breaking: dove,
alighting: fish, gulping: sight, seeing: nose, running:
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370a poem variable as a dying man, willing to try anything,
or a living man, with the consistency of either direction:
just what the mind offers to itself, bread or stone:
in the swim and genesis of the underlying reality things
assume metes and bounds, survive through the wear
375of free-being against flux, then break down to swim and
genesis again: that’s the main motion but several
interturns have been concocted to confuse it: for example,
the human self risks chaos by breaking down to a flash of
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single cells in order to plant the full human code early
380in the beginning: and many other continuities of pattern,
as slowed flux, work through the flux durably: adagio
in furioso: a slow bass line to a treble revel: tell
him he is lost, he will turn in there and show you what
lost is, a positive sight: tell him his iciness is perfect,
385he will lower the cold till perfection drifts like sleep
to aimless absoluteness: tell him he is thin, he will
become so thin the spiritual will take charge: he will
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turn into any failure abruptly as into a detour and find
his way to a highway: tell him he knows beauty,
390he will, going and trying, disclose ugliness: virtue is
waiting anywhere to be by concision of dealing established:
chiefly in the virtueless: huntsman, huntsman, how many
hounds arunning: a lead-hound and a following:
breaking, moving, and filling: people who dress up like
395artists, their art form is dressing up like artists:
the sun came up this morning without clouds before it:
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what is it, then, that the poem is trying to give us
an image of: the ideal image of the ideal man: invariably:
the realist wants to know ideally the ideal realist: the
400ragged man and the ragged poem aspire to ideal raggedness:
the loose or fragmented or scopy: the mind can’t conceive
any way except into the desired image, the ideal, that’s
the only way it works right: let there be, he said
prayerfully though he was only talking, more mass and less
405direction, so that the propaganda cannot get off the pad
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and the concision cannot gather to incision and the
over-simplification cannot settle real clear, accumulative
diversity a dreadnought bristling stifled guns: let
there be, he continued, orb-gathered complication, fuzzy,
410bewildering, so that right carries a heavy bilge of wrong
and wrong looks as if it could sump out right: let—
he moved to the rostrum—certainty wallow iceberg-deep in
confusion: let nobody know very much precisely about
anything in—here, puzzled, he dozed: take that lady:
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415her mind is always lying down pleasing the legions: it is
a bow leant in a corner, gaunt with decommission:
how long did that last last last: it’s snowing now with
the sun shining: squalls with clearings: today is Tues-
day: yesterday there were 9 hrs and 2 minutes of
420daylight, sunup to sundown: that means light is
broadening: right here at the edge of winter-beginning’s
winter-ending: today will probably be 9 hrs and 3 minutes:
tomorrow will be different, maybe 9 hrs and 4 minutes:
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what is the prevailing tone: are there minutes of the
425last meeting: should articles be padded with dummy
footnotes: are there any concepts to circulate: can
anyone form a motion: if we stall, will we sink:
if we run, will thinness split underfoot: the mind’s
one: it pre-existed, I think: even before it was
430mind it was mind plausible: it was the earth: when
it is fully born, it will be another earth, just like
the earth, but visionary, earth luminous with sight:
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it will be nearly half dark: contemplation dwells on
one thing at a time: it will have lows and highs,
435basins and high countries, peaks and abysses, naked
seabottoms and naked summits: it will have interior
circulations, crusts in slow flotation: the wind
will blow through it and rock will confront it: it
will be oriented to polar transactions: nothing will
440be left out, nothing, not a thing, and yet it will be
whole: there will be islands, island chains, bays,
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peninsulas, bottom spreads, inland seas, and mind will
have below its active surface several layers of
sedimentary history, though below that will be the
445melts in high heat and heavy pressure, the mobility
underlying encrustation and phenomenological flux:
there is one mind and one earth: it was all there
before it was first discovered and nothing will have
been added when it is fully elaborated: and yet it is
450completely unknown until made out: then the cosmos:
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why does he write poems: it’s the only way he can mean
what he says: you mean, say what he means: yes,
but it’s harder for him to mean something than say
something: his sayings are facile, light-headed, and
455discontinuous: he keeps saying in order to hope he will
say something he means: poems help him mean what he says:
poems connect the threads between the tuft of his head
and the true water: that’s important to him, like roots
to a turf: without it, the separation would be awful:
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460poems deepen his attention till what he is thinking
catches the energy of a deep rhythm: then he becomes
essentially one: one in thought and motion: then, he
means: the recent forward brain is working with the
medulla oblongata: by the time I get to the end of this
465all, I’ll have to have found something to say to the
people: this scratching around in the private self has
to yield something beyond a p
rivate waste of time: I
have to say, here is my drop of glue, now, somebody,
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hold the world together, or just yourself: I have to say,
470here is a saying, binding: I must not when I get up on
the soapbox wash out: here, I will say, is my offering
to the people, these few words right at the center of my
experience of me and you: the complicated, elaborate weaving
of interconnection: I want to do well: I want people to say,
475did you hear that, that sounded good: perhaps I will say,
the cosmos, as I understand it, wants you to have fun:
or I will say, your deepest error may be divine:
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much have I studied, trashcanology, cheesespreadology,
laboratorydoorology, and become much enlightened and
480dismayed: have, sad to some, come to care as much for
a fluted trashcan as a fluted Roman column: flutes are
flutes and the matter is a mere substance design takes
its shape in: take any subject, everything gathers up
around it: friend of mine is studying barbedwireology
485and he finds you can marshal up much world and history
around the discipline: barbedwire limitations and