by A. R. Ammons
112
1000breaking loose into strings of fast snow: I am unnerved
by openness and pure prose: the blue spruce is like
sprinkled with white crowsfeet, the inner intensive stems
branching, holding snow the needles can’t: and into the
huge, round yew bush starlings light and go two-thirds
1005under: they peck the frit of snow the wind leaves
and drink: I’m reading Xenophon’s Oeconomicus “with
considerable pleasure and enlightenment” and with
appreciation that saying so fills this stanza nicely.
1970–1971
Eyesight
It was May before my
attention came
to spring and
my word I said
5to the southern slopes
I’ve
missed it, it
came and went before
I got right to see:
10don’t worry, said the mountain,
try the later northern slopes
or if
you can climb, climb
into spring: but
15said the mountain
it’s not that way
with all things, some
that go are gone
1971
Left
Particularly near sundown
other worlds
(dome on
dome)
5suggest themselves to longing,
tangerine airs,
violets burnt out emeralds,
time’s rush into wind sheet
as the sun nears the ridge,
10a skinny plane slipping
at the last moment through
the thinnest rift and
away
where the sun locks
15as with a melting opening
the exact high center
of another possibility—
the self-justifying delusions
of darkening,
20this inscrutable by clarity
& undifferentiation,
this single-centered single
dome
spent in the mind’s-eye
25gathering of peripheral sight.
1971 (1972)
The Arc Inside and Out
for Harold Bloom
If, whittler and dumper, gross carver
into the shadiest curvings, I took branch
and meat from the stalk of life, threw
away the monies of the treasured,
5treasurable mind, cleaved memory free
of the instant, if I got right down
shucking off periphery after periphery
to the glassy vague gray parabolas
and swoops of unnailable perception,
10would I begin to improve the purity,
would I essentialize out the distilled
form, the glitter-stone that whether
the world comes or goes clicks gleams
and chinks of truth self-making, never
15to be shuttered, the face-brilliant core
stone: or if I, amasser, heap shoveler,
depth pumper, took in all springs and
oceans, paramoecia and moons, massive
buttes and summit slants, rooted trunks
20and leafages, anthologies of wise words,
schemata, all grasses (including the
tidal Spartinas, marginal, salty
broadsweeps) would I finally come on a
suasion, large, fully-informed, restful
25scape, turning back in on itself, its
periphery enclosing our system with
its bright dot and allowing in nonparlant
quantities at the edge void, void, and
void, would I then feel plenitude
30brought to center and extent, a sweet
easing away of all edge, evil, and surprise:
these two ways to dream! dreaming them’s
the bumfuzzlement—the impoverished
diamond, the heterogeneous abundance
35starved into oneness: ultimately, either
way, which is our peace, the little
arc-line appears, inside which is nothing,
outside which is nothing—however big,
nothing beyond: however small, nothing
40within: neither way to go’s to stay, stay
here, the apple an apple with its own hue
or streak, the drink of water, the drink,
the falling into sleep, restfully ever the
falling into sleep, dream, dream, and
45every morning the sun comes, the sun.
1971 (1971)
SPHERE: THE FORM OF A MOTION (1974)
For Harold Bloom
I went to the summit and stood in the high nakedness:
the wind tore about this
way and that in confusion and its speech could not
get through to me nor could I address it:
5still I said as if to the alien in myself
I do not speak to the wind now:
for having been brought this far by nature I have been
brought out of nature
and nothing here shows me the image of myself:
10for the word tree I have been shown a tree
and for the word rock I have been shown a rock,
for stream, for cloud, for star
this place has provided firm implication and answering
but where here is the image for longing:
15so I touched the rocks, their interesting crusts:
I flaked the bark of stunt-fir:
I looked into space and into the sun
and nothing answered my word longing:
goodbye, I said, goodbye, nature so grand and
20reticent, your tongues are healed up into their own
element
and as you have shut up you have shut me out: I am
as foreign here as if I had landed, a visitor:
so I went back down and gathered mud
25and with my hands made an image for longing:
I took the image to the summit: first
I set it here, on the top rock, but it completed
nothing: then I set it there among the tiny firs
but it would not fit:
30so I returned to the city and built a house to set
the image in
and men came into my house and said
that is an image for longing
and nothing will ever be the same again
Sphere: The Form of a Motion
1
The sexual basis of all things rare is really apparent
and fools crop up where angels are mere disguises:
a penetrating eye (insight), a penetrating tongue (ah),
a penetrating penis and withal a penetrating mind,
5integration’s consummation: a com- or intermingling of parts,
heterocosm joyous, opposite motions away and toward
along a common line, the in-depth knowledge (a dilly),
the concentration and projection (firmly energized) and
the ecstasy, the pay off, the play out, the expended
10nexus nodding, the flurry, cell spray, finish, the
haploid hungering after the diploid condition: the reconciler
of opposites, commencement, proliferation, ontogeny:
2
often those who are not good for much else turn to thought
and it’s just great, part of the grand possibility, that
15thought is there to turn to: camouflagy thought flushed
out of the bush, seen vaguely as potential form, and
pursued, pursued and perceived, declared: the savored
form, the known possession, knowledge carnal knowledge:
the seizure, the satiation: the heavy jaguar takes the
20burro down for a foreleg or so: then, the lighter,
though still heavy, vu
ltures pull and gulp: then, the
tight-bodied black crows peck and scratch: then ants
come out and run around the structure, picking bits:
finally, least bacteria boil the last grease mild:
3
25so the lessening transformers arrive at the subtle condition
fine, the spiritual burro braying free, overwhelming
the hairy, and so must we all approach the fine, our
skinny house perpetual, where in total diminishment we will
last, elemental and irreducible, the matter of the universe:
30slosh, slosh: vulnerability is merely intermediate: beyond
the autopsy and the worm, the blood cell, protein, amino acid,
the nervous atom spins and shines unsmirched: the total,
necessary arrival, the final victory, utterly the total loss:
we’re haplessly one way the wrong way on the runway:
35conglomerates, tongues or eyes or heel strings that
keep us, won’t keep: we want to change without changing
4
out of change: actually, the imagination works pretty
diagrammatically into paradigm so one can “see things”:
and then talk fairly tirelessly without going astray or
40asunder: for me, for example, the one-many problem figures
out as an isoceles triangle (base:diversity and peak:unity)
or, even, equilateral, some rigor of rising: and this is
not to be distinguished from the center-periphery thing, in
that if you cut out a piece of pie from the center-periphery
45circle, you have a triangle, a little rocky, but if you
cut off the arc, it sits up good, as (peak:center:unity)
and (base:periphery:diversity): actually, one could go even
so far as (peak:center:symbol:abstraction), etc., and the other:
5
this works in the bedrock, too, or undifferentiated gas:
50one feels up the two legs of the possibility and, ever
tightening and steered, rises to the crux, to find
there the whole mystery, the lush squeeze, the centering
and prolongation: so much so that the final stone
never locks the peak but inlet:outlet opens unfolding
55into nothingness’s complete possibility, the strangling
through into the darkness of futurity: it is hard at this
point to avoid some feeling, however abstract the circumstance:
if one can get far enough this way where imagination
and flesh strive together in shocking splendors, one can
60forget that sensibility is sometimes dissociated and come:
6
I wouldn’t be surprised if the radiance we talk about isn’t
that part of the structureless lust that rising from the
depths gets by all the mechanisms of mediation and, left over,
feels like religion, the heights visited; that is, the route
65from energy to energy without frigging, an untainted source
with an untainted end: when the professor rises to require
structure in the compositions, he invokes a woman: he wants
shapeliness intact, figure shown forth: dirty old
man hawking order and clarity: but if he would not
70be dark, what a brightness! though I am not enjoying the
first day of spring very much, it is not with me as it is
with my friend George, spending his first spring in the grave:
7
windbaggery, snag-gaggling, yakety-yak, fuss: if you dig
a well, steen it well: earth’s fluid: it moves: any
75discontinuity imposed, opposing the normal intermingled sway,
must be chocked full of resistance: and with a well, one
can’t count on the mechanisms that stay by yielding to the
sway: but if a well, steened well, can stay, it can be
caused to bring together the truly fluid from the so-so:
80precise imposition leading to separation, an unmuddling of
clarity, a purification and cleansing invested with identity:
from bunkum and hoarse gol-danging surgical nicety can remove
a truth’s modest pleasantry: between the mixtures and
distinctions, what is economy to prefer: a cheap bulk of
8
85slush or a costly drop to drink: it is a choice imposition
imposes: for myself I’m tempted to let the well
cave in at times and the water stand to my thirst: I
never did like anything too well done, a scary invitation
to catastrophe: a bright challenge to the insuperable forces:
90let it all mosey: there is no final resistance: nor any
endless going along: if nothing in us, under us, or around us
will redeem us, we’d better get used to the miseries: at least,
unbuffaloed about the outcome: well, make the well well or
don’t: (it has never occurred to me to face the terror but
95as to how to hide from it, I’m a virtual booth of information):
come to think of it I don’t have much smell in my works:
9
though the surface is crisp with pattern still we know
that there are generalized underlyings, planes of substratum
lessening from differentiation: under all life, fly and
100dandelion, protozoan, bushmaster, and ladybird, tendon
and tendril (excluding protocellular organelles) is the same
cell: and under the cell is water, a widely generalized
condition, and under that energy and under that perhaps the
spirit of the place: if we sink we go awash: so
105thanks for the surface if also for the deeps: but if we
pass through the discrete downward to the general, may we
not also pass upward, to the high syntheses of overlyings
and radiances, and may it not be so, extremes meeting, that
10
the heights and depths somewhere join in a near-complete
110fizzle of the discrete: on either side well-boundaried
by the impassable, our selves float here, as
safely as duration allows, time in its stew mixing as much as
unmixing: I could not say, then, that the earthworm is not
my radical cousin, and I could not say that my veins entering
115along the cell walls disresemble the transportative leaf:
I mean, if one speaks of mysticism, it makes good science,
which is the best part of science, that it makes mysticism
discussable without a flurry: and yet, too, the discrete
annihilated, suddenly here it is, blandished and available:
120things go away to return, brightened for the passage:
11
desk chair, wheel-back side chair, armchair, country
corner chair, bedside commode, side table, pad-foot
side table, lowboy, credence table, console, drop-leaf
table, writing table, armoire, refectory table, ladder
125chair, washstand, pedestal table, tilt-top supper table,
oak coffer, dining chair, settle, bedside table, bureau,
serving table, chest, slant-front bureau, chest-desk,
bureau desk, spindle-back dining chair, kettle table,
corner table, bookcase, chiffonier: in the furniture
130of the mind, diversity pushed into distinction is enabling,
a pleasant calculation of possibility: the same can be
said for footwear, glassware, software, and willowware:
12
they say when egalitarianism is legislated into ultimate
ramification, legislation and effect click
135heels into totalitarianism: the smoothest sailing’s in
>
a canal, the water as if abstracted out of itself, slack, mere,
unresisting, aerial: while anything you tried to send
down a ravine of boulders would be substantially altered,
even something as compliant, accommodating, as water,
140rushed, stirred, whitened, and sprayed, anything more
got-up, say a watermelon, likely to be finished: anyone
who knows sharp lakewater or blasted bay water or
open sea water knows where he wants to sail, prizing the
choppy, difficult, and swift: I do not smooth into groups:
13
145the shapes nearest shapelessness awe us most, suggest
the god: elemental air in a spin, counterclockwise
for us, lets its needlepoint funnel down and gives us
a rugged variety of the formless formed: and the great
slow stir of the Sargasso cycles the weed in, a holding,
150motion’s holding: snow from snow kicks up in a fume
and sprinkles audibly the stripped lilac shrubs: the
shape of air, deep as material, blunt off a cliff face: fire
as it crowns out over forests and clings to
itself exploding as if into a new fire: the gods near
155their elemental or invisible selves turn or sweep or
stand still and fill us with the terror of apprehending: