by A. R. Ammons
tonic, subdominant, diminished: I can’t tell the
significant significances from the insignificant
significances: won’t you, I implored, thin out your
745registration or, at least, give discernible direction
to your componency: it would take a battery of tonometers
just to find out about where you’re at: in the
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contextual sense: have something to say: say it:
need you spray sense and be trusted only in the spray’s
750shape: such enlargements of limitation often
fail into disorientation at the center: boo boo pee
doo: plot a course, Mr. Sulu: let’s split: poetic
action mirrors human action: what preserves the
absurdist through the enactment of absurdity, what but
755the feathery need to touch ideal absurdity: the
ideal’s an imperishable validity: the illumination
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identity takes thrust toward: it is the proposition
how we are to live our lives: the ideal hero and the
ideal anti-hero have ideality in common: heroes may
760change ways, clothes, directions, moods, but all bear
the pressure of ideality: James, the train robber,
sublime: Appleseed, the life of service, yes:
the vacuum cleaner salesman can, in our time, hardly
give the imagination suction, gather dust into any
765credible bag: rail splitter, spike driver, done, gone:
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the sum of everything’s nothing: very nice: that
turns the world back in on itself: such as right
when you possess everything, you’d give everything
up for a sickle pear: I hope my philosophy will turn
770out all right and turn out to be a philosophy so as
to free people (any who are trapped, as I have been)
from seeking any image in the absolute or seeking
any absolute whatsoever except nothingness:
nothingness, far from being failure’s puzzlement,
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775is really the point of lovely liberation, when
gloriously every object in and on earth becomes just
itself, total and marvelous in its exact scope,
able to exist without compromise out to the precise
skin-limit of itself: it allows freedom to fall
780back from the thrust to the absolute into the world
so manifold with things and beings: the hollyhock,
what a marvel, complete in itself: the bee,
how particular, how nothingness lets him buzz
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around: carless in Gaza, with a rocker arm on a valve
785snapped, I to the gas station made it this morning,
left car, and by taxi so-forthed with son and wife
to University, son and wife going on beyond me to
nursery school: lunch hour nearing, I decided to
hitchhike home and did, first with a lady and baby
790daughter all in a foreign small car, then with two
toughlooking guys from Virginia, leaned front seat
forward and let me in the back: we talked about
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the snow, local squalls filling the air even though
the sun was shining: the driver said he had to get
795back to Pennsylvania this afternoon: I asked if he had
snowtires and he said, No, and said he’d heard he could
get picked up if he got stuck without snowtires:
whereupon, apprehensively bound to be cheerful and useful,
I said when it’s so cold like today the roads
800stay dry even with the snow because the cars blow the
snow away as if it were feathers and that probably
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he wouldn’t have any trouble: just then a dog glanced
out onto the road, the driver, pushing back in his
seat, soaked on the brakes, and the car slid hardly at
805all, verifying, as if by a universal complicity, my
faith’s predictions: well, then, as we neared the
Corners, things seemed with me a little brighter, so
I said, that stop sign ahead would be perfect for me:
he would have to stop anyway, and I would know
810immediately, if the other guy didn’t open the door, that
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I was about to be robbed, killed, or bent out of my will
which seemed about the worst thing: all went well,
ruining the story: I got out, saying thankyous and
wishingwells and walked about the mile down Hanshaw
815home: just turning the curve in sight of home, I saw,
as in a perfect vision, my wife and son pulling up into
the driveway, driven back from nursery school in someone’s
luminous stationwagon: I felt relieved: I said, ah, the
broken and divergent lines of morning are coalescing:
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820Wilde in some ways contra naturam really was: he loved
Art and set it against Nature, possibly because Art is
overwhelmed by Nature and he identified with being
overwhelmed: somewhat contra mundum, too: since
social nature had a majority against him: well, he did
825rather well, a sort of terrier of the mind: he barked,
if mostly in the regions where opposites are clear, not
reconciled: I admire that: why think nature good if it’s
against you: if it’s against you, then it’s hard to
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approve even what produced you: not to approve what
830produced you, though, bumfuzzles, since it’s a kind
of suicidal vindication to hate nature in order to
love the self: how twisty things are: nature ought to
bear the blame, then, for fumbling, or society
learn to approve nature even when it fumbles, as being
835also nature: well, I don’t know what to hope in that
way, since society is also contra naturam, a device, a
convention: but if so how could Wilde come to love
94
convention so, I mean, convention as artifice, not the
conventional: Wilde, Art, Society, Convention—and then
840convention damned him: that shuts off most of the roads
and suggests not detours but deadends: when a lioness
whelps a defective cub, she whomps it against the
ground till it’s dead: well, I think we ought to put
ourselves above the beasts and take care to be respectful
845where persons move: provided all persons move with
respect: we should exhaust all our virtues, first:
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though it’s gooseegg zero, morning sunlight hits the
strip of woods broadside and a squirrel is sitting out
pretty still on a limb taking in the direct radiation:
850enormous jungle-like fronds of ice (and other configurations
like species) have run across possessing the outer windows
but, now, the sun up, thaw like a fungus is making dark
melts in the foliage: the sun’s arc rises a little
daily into the world, marking a slightly longer
855journey along the ridge between rising and setting:
96
yesterday afternoon, right after I had written about
the adventures of the morning, the gas station called and
said my car was ready: I had been thinking how many
days, not how many hours, it would take: so John, that’s
860his name up at Ned’s Corners Station, drove the car on
down here to 606, less than a mile, and I made out a
check for him ($19.3
9), dropped him back at the station,
and took off for the University, free and mobilized again!
the total parts came to $7.79, 1 push rod ($1.25), 1
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865rocker arm ($1.35), l rocker retainer ($0.50), l set 2
gaskets @ $2.10 ($4.20), and 1 roll electrical tape ($0.49):
the total labor was $10.50: r & r (remove and repair?)
l. (left?) valve cover, r & r both valve covers, replace
rocker arm, push rod, & retainer on #4 cyl intake valve:
870all in all I thought I got off easy: one thing interesting
is that Ned’s Corners Station is at 909 Hanshaw Road
and I’m 606 Hanshaw Road: that’s configuration:
today is, as I said, bright and cold: but 9 hrs 12 min.:
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everyday (somedays, twice) I remember who I am and I
875metamorphose away through several distracting transformations
till I get myself out in bidable shape on comfortable
ground, and then the shows, the transactions, carry
traces of such brilliant energy of invention that I am
half willing to admire my new self, thrust into its
880lofty double helices, so winding: well, that’s one way
to get out of the dumps, but they say it’s wiser to
find the brilliants right in the dumps themselves: but on
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the show side, there’s not only the show itself, bodiless
if arresting, but the honest mechanisms that produced
885the show: those mechanisms are earnest and work to
conserve their energy through transformations with a
greater efficiency than you can find anywhere in the
dumps: I mean, the quantity of structured mass you have
at the end is almost perfectly equal to that at the
890beginning: on the dump, though, fire, efficient,
will achieve nothing but ash, heat, and smoke: excellent
100
change, but poor payload: or take rust, sluggish,
but it operates okay, not that you can do much with
ironic dust: the thing is to derive the jus commune
895from the jus singulare: never must the jus commune
breeze through eradicating the jus singulare: the jus
commune must be merely a fall-out from happenstance:
that way it can find some curvature (if any) with the
actual: otherwise, the jus commune might become clear
900to itself and propose imposition: never: never never:
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I don’t think I want to be buried here in these rocky
hills: once underground, how could I ever get my arms
free of the silk and steel, how could I ever with those
feet travel through the earth to my sweet home country
905where all the flesh that bore me, back through grandfathers
and grandmothers, lies, and my little
brothers and my little sister I never saw, born before
me and dying small: and where will my living sisters
be put down, not here, and their children who might
102
910visit me sometime to weep: but, a running weed,
I’ve come off up here and started a new offshoot
nucleus of a family and that sort of act perhaps should
be run into the ground: I mean, extended, preserved
into the ground: but this is phantasmagoria: death’s
915indifference will absorb living nostalgias and, anyway,
earth’s a single mother and all who lie in her are brothers
and sisters: jungle cats and mudcats, sleek and slick:
the other night on Hee-Haw somebody said, “slick as
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a mudcat’s fin”: that’s slick: poetry to the people,
920not that they will ever acknowledge it: well, it’s
night now and still fair, the moon full: the temperature
is dropping and the heater picking up: I put John’s
tent together in the basement this afternoon: 8 rods
of fiberglass, connected with flexible tubes into 4
925lengths, those then run through the sleeves, aluminum
sleeves adding support at the joints, and all brought
together at the top: a zipper door: his little house:
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I looked up man in the dictionary and he was illustrated
and, as it turned out, chiefly muscle, a red fabric, and
930bone, the whiteness men share: this creature, I
thought, has taken over, I know not whether because of
the freedom of the fingerbones or of the wagging, detachable
jaw, one about as gross and fine as the other: he
depends, ultimately, I thought again, on grass but, my,
935what a transfiguration from the grass: he sees, his
vision air-clear: he tastes and feels: he thinks, ah:
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he devours: he falls into necessities, or madnesses, only
his body can untangle: he carries in his lobed, zoned
skull earth’s little supernova, the cerebral explosion,
940somewhat in its stems and exfoliations like a mushroom
cloud: in him is ticking the californium 254 he’s
detected in bombs and stars, whether still in its
first or some lesser half-life, unknown: but his little
explosion is growing up to equal celestial models: for
945example, the other night the paper said two nearby
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galaxies, hidden by our Milky Way, have been found, sight
having made other kinds of sight hunting, eating, loving
had no use for, some high conditions of burning: oh, yes,
we’re in the explosions and we’re going to see them out
950and no other course could be half as interesting: falling
back can’t help us now, returning to nature’s lovely
subtle mechanisms: forward to the finish, of course, the
way it’s always been or to a knowledge how to avoid the
finish: the possibility seen through to its perfect end:
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955the young are earnest, impatient: the older have learned
the alternatives, to be wrecked or reconciled: oh,
but it’s not that easy: combinations and degrees make
life rough and rugged: yuck, yuck, the muck-sleet sings
pone the midnight windowpane, and the shattery wind
960the shutters shudders: the confessor yanks up a belch
of privacy gone to seed: orangutans aren’t groupy
as gorillas: cello alto solo pronto: if there is to be
no principle of inclusion, then, at least, there ought
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to be a principle of exclusion, for to go with a maw at
965the world as if to chew it up and spit
it out again as one’s own is to trifle with terrible
affairs: I think I will leave out China, the perturbations
and continuities, transmutations and permutations of
Chinese civilization because, since that is so much,
970giving it up’s an immediate and cordial act of abasement,
betokening readiness to leave the world alone as
currently constituted (but, of course, how could words
109
do otherwise!): but I’m willing also to leave out most,
if not all, of the Amazon basin (all those trees, what
975a whack), millions of islands I’ve never heard of and
some big ones I have, all ocean bottoms, all very high
places (whose spirituality blurs me), nearly all clouds
(which come and go lots before they pass through here), and,
if the population of the earth is
four billion people,
980then nearly four billion people: am I safe yet: of
course not: principles of exclusion become inclusive, etc.:
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hiatuses, non-sequiturs, and indiligences later (nine hours
and forty-three minutes daylight) federal reorganizations
and revenue-sharings, advancings on extremely heavy
985volume, what is everything about or anything for:
procedure’s the only procedure: if things don’t add
up, they must interest at every moment: a
difficulty: yesterday, severe, high-altitude winds
took our lower atmospheres in tow, making highly-compressed
990bottom stirs, thunder at noon, one flash and blam,
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and an even mixture of snow, rain, and sleet: zero
visibility was visible as near waves and white streams:
today is iron-fist windy and nudging zero: outside the
pheasant have lost all fear: they hunker down by the
995picket fence, inattentive as the enemyless, or knowing
the enemy, too, must bear the cold: the ground is
assuming the curvatures of wind, flat-open places skinned
clean of snow, interruptions by fall-out being built up
to, mounds with sharp precipices, sometimes a mound