by A. R. Ammons
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intellectual definitions produce about the same
securities and disasters: I think a lot about meter and
right away it becomes the mirror in which I see the face
490of the times: oh, but the hierarchy of subjects persists,
sociology way above scabology, philosophy a sight beyond
toothbrushosophy: the aristocracy of learning is so much
will: I’d as soon know one thing as another, what’s the
difference, it all fits and comes out the same: and I
495can tell you, I’d rather see a tempest in a teapot
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than Shakespeare plain: but Shakespeare was all right:
a nursemaid’s lip meant as much to him as the king’s eye:
but he never got it straight that in talking about the
actual king and the symbolical king he was merely
500engaging a problem in rhetoric: well, I’m glad because
I can’t reconcile the one with the many either—except
in the fuzzy land of radiant talk—and if Shakespeare grossly
surpassing me failed, I don’t have to worry about surpassing
others, my place comfortable in the lowerarchy:
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505work’s never done: the difficult work of dying
remains, remains, and remains: a brain lobe squdging
against the skull, a soggy kidney, a little vessel
smartly plugged: wrestling with one—or those—until
the far-feared quietus comes bulby, floating, glimmer-wobbling
510to pop: so much more mechanical, physical than
spiritual-seeming grief: than survivors’ nights filled
without touch or word, than any dignity true for a state
of being: I won’t work today: love, be my leisure:
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there is something dwelling in too correspondent for
515haphazardry: I read Plotinus once, a little, and
saw my mind (increased): currents, polar fads,
flash back and forth through a center apparently staid:
we may just now be getting enough lead into time to note
that nothing at all is moving except into the halfways
520of diversion: what if at the core the final eye’s
design’s fixed, the vision beaming locked, we the motes
crossing about, breaking into and dropping out
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of light: what if we’re not seeking the light at all,
the transfixion (stare to stare in a bereft learning)
525but worrying the corners of our confined, held
suasions for the exit we could, from the starved light,
choose: why has the dark taken so much if darkness is
not the satisfaction: and how have we found the will
to thrive through the light from sway to sway: O
530Plotinus (Emerson, even) I’m just as scared as comforted
by the continuity, one sun spelling in our sun-made heads:
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I exist by just so much as I am will-lessly borne
along: I am as given up as the boat-sloped maple leaf
on fast water: not a thing remains, not a motion’s
535curl, of any desire, and none of the things I desired
and gathered are with me: I deserve nothing, not
a glimpse into this world overbearingly rich, this
hungry, hardly-visionable air: just as empty as I am
is the just emptiness, not a leaf between here and
540extinction I have not spent the night in luminous
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supplication with: by just so much as a tide flows in
and lifts me floating, by just so much I can never
grin the deathgrin at the silver abundance until I must:
where I never came to self, repletion’s an abundant
545wind (I’m picking out the grains, gritty, between me
and that abundance): considerable as any least
burdockflower, I’m alive to the stalk tip: anything
cries salvation big as capturing a waterfall: by just
so much as I have given up, I am sustained till finally
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550the boat bumps solid, sucks the surface tit, and, bloated, drowns:
today’s the first of the year, icicle, cloud, root
in a slow procedure, every house re-roofed with snow:
the biggest numbers represent the finest differences:
plus or minus two parts of variation in a trillion, as
555in narrowing down on the inconstant readings of a
fundamental constant—the mass of the electron, the
speed of light, or the hyperfine splitting in hydrogen
proton precessions: nature seems firm with casual
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certainties (one could say a steel spike is a foot
560long) but pressed for certainty breaks out
in bafflings of variability, a thousand close
measurings of the spike averaged out and a thousand
efforts to average out the variables in the instruments
of measure or in the measuring environment
565(room temperature, humidity, the probable frequency
the door to the room is opened): recalcitrance is built
in perfectly, variations thereon perceived as possibility:
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oh, I’m going to walk right out onto th’elision fields,
eat up gloria in the morning and have it out with her
570in the evening: I’m going to postpone reality (but for
cheeseburgers) and focus yearning, doubly focus it,
bring into view three-dimensional hopes and hokum:
dying here sour with flesh and sweat—the disposition
of nature’s bounty, a bounteous abandonment to sludge,
575desireless, breathless: otherwise, otherwise to the limit!
if all must come down, make a high possibility for the
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dependable work, space out an extreme differential,
an illusion for the future: the poet entangles: the
critic untangles: the poet, baited by illusion, figures
580that massive tangling will give locus to core-tangles
and core-tangles to the core-tangle that will
fix reality in staid complication, at that central
core’s center the primordial egg of truth: ah, what an
illusion: from the undifferentiated core-serum the mind
585turns back to the definition of its tangles for rescue
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and then back to the core for clarification, only to
hesitate in quandary’s puzzlement: carefully, the critic
unwinds thread from thread, making out the energy and
translating it into ratiocination: but the untangling
590done, all the untangling done, nothing remains but the
dumb end of the last thread and the opus of statement
that replaces it: illusion! illusion! there are not
two somethings but two nothings: one nothing surrounds,
extends beyond, the fullest entanglement, and the other
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595nothing is an infinitesimal dot of void at the center of
the primordial egg: inside calls to outside: in between
is the choice, an impoverishment that does away even with
the egg, or an abundance of entanglement very much like
the world but also nothing: for myself, I would rather
600wear beads than have no neck at all: the void is the
birthplace of finches, gyrfalcons, juncos (a specialty),
snowy egrets, woodcocks, hummingbirds, crows, jays,
wood ducks, warblers, titmice, and the end of everything:
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I dreamed Edna St. Vincent Millay’s female companio
n
605had just arrived on the beach of Europe and was reciting
a moving poem about why had they come back when their old
friends had resettled or were lying in the sod: it was
a very sad poem and the lady was sad and wrinkled:
I woke up just before crying myself, impressed with
610the power of the poetry and life’s risky changes:
the morning was cloudless, rosy with atmosphere, the sun
already brightened to appear suddenly over the sudden ridge:
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a little philosophy never hurt anybody: or else, little
philosophy hurts everybody: takes a lot of philosophy to
615make a little philosopher: the bubble swells and bursts,
the leavings cherishable, as being of themselves, not
devoted to an organ of use but, as with balloons, dumbly
elastic, shrunk wrinkled, and, often, highly colorful:
constituting an encounter of thing to thing: the bubble
620bursts and then one participates in the universal energy
of biting an apple, having a tooth filled, turning a
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corner (the friction and earth-displacement of that) so
that the universe seems available in the
gravity of a ladybug tipped down a blade of grass:
625there’s a difference between division and differentiation:
from the primal energy, much has split away into identity—
toothpicks, yew berries, jungle gyms, pole beans (the
thoughtful differentiations into bell pepper and basil)—
but a little time undercuts these matters into shape (soon
630they will be shapelessly available again) so that division
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is, at most, temporal—(mind & body) ha! (mind & nature) ha!
(reality & appearance) ha! (dream & fact) ha!—no, no, this
is not an expression of division, of taxonomy, dogma, bouncy
triadic motion, structure, solidification, type, but of
635identity differentiation: one of the strongest thrusts,
you might say, is to perish away from unity the fully
discrete, expressed, captured hollybush—the lust to
individuation we’ve heard so much about: let me, the cry
is, stand like the drop cast back from the breaking
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640crest apart and regard the other satisfactory expressions
so there may be action, interaction, contrariety, and sum:
but the rise into differentiation is exactly equal
to the fall, a just compact not too friendly to the
appetite ravingly incomplete, or something, the deflections
645into limbo: routes go awry but everything anyhow gets
safely, if reluctantly, back into circulation, the
least differentiae nearest the continuum: it’s true the
splits sometimes look perfect, the divisions ghastly, severe
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alienation an agreeing merely with temporality: but actually
650while the leaf may not answer one’s questions, it waves, a
nice language, expressive and complete: and if the ladybug,
traveling across the droppy peaks of grass, seems not my friend,
then I have not understood hanging to cool in shade; or
legs nimbly feeling for grass-hair; or any other
655sight-loud talk: if I pick a leaf, it wilts: if I cap a
spring, it swells: if I crush a grass-spear, it stains:
if the quince crowds the hollyhock, the hollyhock
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bends away, suffering subtle losses of rectitude:
what am I to say: my brotherhood’s immense, and if the gods
660have vanished that were never here I do not miss them:
some universe comes here to my yard every day or so and bursts
into a fly standing, with six little dents, on water: sometimes
when I’m shaving, a real small fly, screen-penetrating, gets
stuck in a bowl-drop of water: but he wiggles and would be all
665right if something could be done with the whole him, floating:
but when I touch a tissue to the drop of water, tension pulls him
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down, crushing him limp, so he never gets up, no matter how
dry: a killing rescue: some things will not work: one day
I poured brine and salt-ice from the icecream freezer onto
670a strip of ground near the hedge: earthworms walloped up
rampant and thrashing and then went puffy-limp and
white: I have killed I can’t tell how many thousand priceless
moths and flies (even goldfinches and bright-streaked warblers)
sucked up by the grill or radiator grid: all of these lives
675had been acting in accordance with given principles, identical
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to my own: nothing’s changed, with all the divisions
and terrors: the physical drowns and buoys, divides and comes
together: the bird’s song-air’s in my range, comes on my air:
I wrote the foregoing passage in July last year, which accounts
680for the change of weather and some summery tone: and a
slightly longer line: winter is different, shortening:
if you believe in equivocation as a way then you
must also believe in univocation because that is one
of the possibilities of equivocation: and if you
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685believe all is fire why then everything is, including
the stones’ dull music, solid, slow, and
cold: and the weatherless moon less is nevertheless
singing blips of meteoric bits, the flash
smirching to glistening moon-tears of solar effusions,
690the wind, the solar wind, that pours out coronal lacings
into a great space: and then the mud by the swamp
ponds with cloud trails of crawdads scurrying is working
with little cellular thrivings: and the cool fire of
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ferns climbing tree-footings from the deep freshets:
695allow, allow for the cryogenic event even, low down
nearly where the atoms give up relation and drift in slow
falls, incredible, spaceless beads: that is an extreme
form of burning, say, but of the fire: I can’t
help thinking that what we have is right enough, the
700core of the galaxy, for example, a high condition,
ample, but here, though, on the surface at least,
toads, picnic tables, morning glories, firs afire:
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the world seems to me a show closed down, a circus
left standing: the ropes slack, the loose tent
705bellies and whomps in the wind like a scared gigantic
jellyfish: some stragglers are around but they are
turned inward on their purposelessness: they make up
directions that go nowhere: they turn missing corners:
the clown’s paint has worn off: his rags have become
710rags: his half-bald wig has become his head, his falls
have become his tricks: he now clowns to the universe:
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now meter is interesting: the prospects are before
us: I feel the need for a realistic approach: we were
promised for today nine hours and six minutes of
715daylight: we were promised no sunlight and received
none: but can you imagine forty degrees: we have it:
the ground is practically asplatter with eavesdropping:
there are pools under the floating mush: they are not
clearly of a depth: one must know the terrain well or
720fill his boots: the garage, the cold garage, and the
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porch still have six inches of snow but the house across
the way whose second floor is all under a slanting roof
is snow-free: the woods, unhung completely,
have resumed an old darkness, whereas yesterday they were
725still irradiated with snowholdings: the sun,
invisible before, has set into another invisibility and
the consequences are darkening here through the clouds:
oh this little time-drenched world! how it jiggles with
flickering! light as history, as relic, light two
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730billion years old, moves its ancient telling through
the universe and deposits right here on my grass on a
clear night dim sediment of sizable duration: that
light can be so old and far-traveled, like flint, no
prayerstone that constant, the permanent telling of
735that quickness: lucky that only by the equalizing instant
anything survives, lucky for us, who can thereby kiss
out time to a full reduction and know everything ravished,
burnt out in a lid’s quickness: the total second:
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sir, I told him, you have so many tones I can’t tell
740which one’s prevailing: the dominant from the
predominant: you have so many, they come in chords,