The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1

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

  56

  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:

  57

  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:

  58

  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

  59

  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:

  60

  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

  62

  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:

  64

  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

  65

  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

  66

  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

  67

  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:

  68

  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:

  69

  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

  70

  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

  73

  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

  74

  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

  76

  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

  77

  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:

  79

  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:

  80

  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


  81

  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

  82

  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:

  83

  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,