by A. R. Ammons
14
wood, though, a log, rigid with shape, seems
innocent and meek, accepted, trivial: even starlings,
grazing in a dark patch, move as a bunch, single flights
160out or in a small percentage of the potential: the
ashtray sits with a flat, notched containment, powerless:
shape, definition, ease: thank the gods for those
though only the least gods will take them on or those
gods are least who do: but the real gods, why talk
165about them, unavailable: they appear in our sight when they
choose and when we think we see them whole, they stall
and vanish or widen out of scope: the highest god
we never meet, essence out of essence, motion without motion:
15
in the generations and becomings of our minds, anthologies,
170good sayings are genes, the images, poems, stories
chromosomes and the interminglings of these furnish beginnings
within continuities, continuities within trials, mischances,
fortunate forwardings: gene pool, word hoard: the critic
samples the new thing, he turns it over in his consideration,
175he checks alignments, proportions, he looks into the body of
the anthology to see if the new thing hooks in, distorts, to raise
or ruin: he considers the weight, clarity, viability of
the new thing and reconsiders the whole body of the anthology:
if the new thing finds no attachment, if energy, cementing,
180does not flow back and forth between it and the anthology,
16
it dies, withered away from the configuration of the people:
but if it lives, critic and teacher show it to the
young, unfold its meaning, fix its roots and extend its reach:
the anthology is the moving, changing definition of the
185imaginative life of the people, the repository and source,
genetic: the critic and teacher protect and reveal the source
and watch over the freedom of becomings there: the artist
stands freely into advancings: critic and teacher choose, shape,
and transmit: all three need the widest opening to chance
190and possibility, so perceptions that might grow into currents
of mind can find their way: all three are complete men,
centralists and peripheralists who, making, move and stay:
17
groups form—it’s natural—agglutinations, a center shaping,
a core center of command and focus: group attaches to group,
195some slight delimitation still distinguishing them, and region
to region, till a public is formed, however tenuous and
widespread the binding syrup now: my sympathies do not move
that way, building toward the high consolidation (except in
poems), the identifying oneness of populations, peoples: I
200know my own—the thrown peripheries, the stragglers, the cheated,
maimed, afflicted (I know their eyes, pain’s melting amazement),
the weak, disoriented, the sick, hurt, the castaways, the
needful needless: I know them: I love them: I am theirs:
I can’t reach them through the centers of power: the centers
18
205of power aim another way from them: I reach them out in the
brush in the rangeful isolation, night: I touch them: I
turn my face into the rock walls and say sayings: the rock
jiggles with magic: the black grass burns darkness, fries:
the brush dances: I do the ones I love no good:
210I hold their pain in my hands and toss it in moonlight:
it multiplies and sparkles: I attack trees and wrestle
them to the ground: I roll rocks into heaps and pull the heaps
down: come, I say, with morning, this is the exact specification
of the account: the leg is inflamed: the tooth is aching:
215the mind gathers and dissolves, the water is both fast and
deep, the branches are picked clean, but saying is becoming day:
19
oh, it’s spring, and I’m more transparent than ever:
I heard the white-breasted nuthatch gurble over the trunk
bark today, and tonight everything is so clear it’s
220going down to zero: my idealism’s as thin as the sprinkled
sky and nearly as expansive: I don’t love anybody much:
that accounts for my width and most of my height: but
I love as much as I can and that keeps me here but light:
everything is so plain: death is lake-space, crystal dusk:
225(a morning following, the poet still alive but with
a headache, a toothache, a throatache, a jawache, and a
backache, forges on)—though the snow on the lawn has
receded into a numerous archipelago of small valleys and
20
though the boughs on the south side of the blue spruce
230hang calm in a heat-holding of the bright sun and though
the garage eave is letting the snow down in a linear rain
still I am not high on the bestseller lists, the Wonderful
Award is gradually being given to someone else (more
deserving) and the money’s pouring out: funny, when we
235were oriented geocentric (with our heads in the harmonious
skies) we became unsettled by locating vaster centers but
made a rescue by bringing our heads down to a geocentric
identity with the earth, the core-mind of the hot moving
metals, the swimming transitional zone between core and
240solidification, and then, of course, the discrete, cool
21
variegated surface: from a large threat, a concise retreat:
a woman in black dress and gray apron spreads mayonnaise
on a slice of bread: the knife glimmers pushing the pliant
ridge before it: there is lettuce but not much light to see
245by: maybe ham-and-lettuce-with-mayonnaise (I sometimes
order that): the woman talks softly but urgently to a
heavier woman beside her: they are discussing how the
sandwich is to be made: the procedure is scheduled and, step
by step, must be done right: the dead man who will accompany
250the sandwich is either in the next room in a box or right
in the kitchen, which could explain why the women whisper:
he does not yet know he is dead: he wakes underground,
22
feels around for the sandwich: he rises to eat or just
goes back to sleep: or the ham-and-lettuce crackle and
255squish in loud teeth and generate light for the eyes: a
new world appears: light that he can move in swells: are
the women done with the sandwich: is it time to tighten
the lid: last-minute placements, arrangements: has the trip
started: I think of the box, the closure underground: I do
260not trust the lettuce: eyes of the dead open later in the
dark: I wake: but sail, sail on, oblate spheroid,
feather-light at center, snug about floating dimensions, speed
like a wish in the vacuum, even though for 46 years the
redbird has been red, dropped stones have fallen, beans have
23
265twined (counterclockwise, again) up the stakes, merry-go-rounds
have maintained an exhilarating, centrifugal verge: it may
be the mind can wear out the earth: what a put-down
for the enterprising, inventive earth: an empty mind on a
bleached planet: bet on the void: but, of course, nature
2
70sheds deadwood and spins commencements out, tendrils,
surprised to be here and looking forward: a hell of
a way to keep fresh: you could wish nature would accept the
challenge to keep us here and keep us entertained: the mind
has come up with some interestingly inexhaustible quandaries,
275at least, nodes resistant, wherein as you go in you come
out, presumably the only stillness a nothingness at the
24
center: a good task for those so minded who would not prefer
to be out regarding waves: bugus ecstaticus: hocus focus:
some things should be forgotten on the grounds that they
280aren’t worth remembering: coelum empyreum that dries up gods
into luminosities, radiances cooling into sightlessness:
brine, dearth, desolation, sand, the grand circulation, the
lesser circulations trivial, the fireball shrinking and
swelling—bells rung apart from the savagery of a tune, the
285word bells of dissonance between the harmonious keys—(play
up the other side a bit, too, some other time), sprite of
falls, now nothing inspires gladness in breaking water: some
things are discrete (who stores gathers thieves) if not
25
dichotomous: but if I back off to take the shape of a tree
290I gather blurs: when does water seeping into the roothairs
pass the boundary after which it is tree: the light, the
surrounding, penetrating, shading light, at what aural
remove from the actual leaf does light cease to be tree: or
do the tree boughs linger all the way into the sun: when
295the leaves fall, as they are falling now in shoals of variable
intensities, when does the wind have them and the tree give
them up: is the high syrup invisible moving under, through,
and by discretions our true home, not these bodies so much
change makes and ends: but dichotomy, no: I can’t divide
300structure and function: as one loosens, the other fades:
26
we want to go home and exist in a quietude like merriment
but we can’t go home as ourselves but wearing the faces
of many answering things until, faceless, we can’t tell we’re
home because we are: here in a closing house, we have the
305self to have, wherein, however, dreams of home come and go
as with foreigners and exiles: from implacability and
quandary we make shabby or golden peace: pain at the end will
move us like a willing rocket away: short of the cycle of
the natural ongoing is the human, a stream broken, bent,
310stalled, re-begun that began back with the first transmissible
molecule and is sticking to time and motion still: if one
adds a point of light to the ongoing mind, one exists with,
27
lodges, a preserved energy, ever able to give energy off,
a great peculiarity, the only immortality known: it is a
315real translation but the body dies away from it and even
the species must go by going or changing out of itself:
nothing the biggest subject, total comprehension is
a wipe-out: but if one adds a point of light to ongoing
mind, the point may lock a right angle, righteous with
320rigidity, the identity firm but unavailable to accommodation:
but one’s point of light may be a worm wriggling away at
a coordinate constant—destructive creativity: it is not
possible to make an altogether favorable decision: the
rightest mind is shadowed by leftovers’ dark carriages,
28
325the unadducible, the small haunting that tilts
rightmindedness toward the possible: protected from
mental congealing, having finished the pyramid, one recalls
the circle: everything is so clear: the round yew (or
whatever it is) that sits on the lawn like a big green
330beachball reacted immediately to coolish weather by
reddening in the berries, and then gangs of cedar waxwings
(maybe it’s a cedar) came through and softening up to the
bush, a mellow beating, took the berries, but the softening
is because the bush is, however hard-limbed inside,
335peripherally limber, so the birds combine wingy air with
alighting carefully: when they’ve fed, they can fly off hard
29
and fast: ecstatic as mating, the transforming’s pleasing:
a windy dusk, the clouds low and running, the maple leaves
picking up yellow glows, citron pellucidity: spirits
340loosen from the ground: unremembered and unresolved are
coming back, breaking free, flapping and gnashing, spooking
the bones of the milling trees, some leaves letting go
skittering streetlight black dances: cats twist frying in
the wind: keep low: the hedges move: there’s a lit door:
345hello: we’re pirates: how can and how long can an identity
hold to the skin of the earth: day before yesterday was
brisk windy, blustery, and a lot of leaves fell, some of
them not quite ready couldn’t hold on, and I said if it’s
30
calm tomorrow (which was yesterday) not a leaf will fall:
350you know the casual fall when a leaf comes off over nothing:
extremity can move ahead of time: but by today others had
mellowed at the pedicel, ready to unclasp to zephyrs: I’m
in touch with spirits: squeaky she-devils, flapping jacks,
batty left-overs: listen: I know Matthew Arnold is not
355far off: he’s going to come roaring out of the woods, deeply
offended by the briars and limber limbs, and mount up on a
high stone chair and declaim to the woods: he’s going to
reinaugurate the distinctions and subordinations that make
sense: he’s going to turn the lofty lofty and broad and
360force the minuscule into its residence: we’re going to climb
31
up the low belly of this sow century, through the seventies,
eighties, right on upward to the attachments, the anterior
or posterior fixation, anything better than the swung pregnancies
of these evil years: considering the fluxions, radiations,
365drifts, malleabilities, considering chance and random (what
could be more just than that a united world take its power
from and bring its power to the person—the widest sweep of
unity taking definition and meaning from the unit) (the pheasants
neck-nicking walk out of the snowthickets and explode over
370the white paling fence away: it’s afternoon, gray, snow:
the eavesdrops a much-intervaled music, alive, unintentioned,
scraggly): considering sensations, rampaging difficulties,
32
poor assessments, it’s hard to draw a line, the careful,
arrogant, arbitrary imposition, the divider that blocks off
375and sets apart, the arising of difference and distinction:
the discrete a bolus of slowed flux, a locus of depressed
reaction rates, a boned and fibered replication: slowed
but not stopped (heightened within its slows): on the instant
of cessation, disintegration’s bacteria flare: bloom, puff,
380and blow with change: much energy devoted to staving off
insweeps of alteration: to slow, defer, to chew up change
into the materials of slowing: until the body, increasin
gly
owed, is paid: take the mind’s radiant works, the ground
changes under them: they lift off into distraction: one
33
385needs clarities to know what one is baffled by, the small
left- and righthandedness: suppose one saw the nonsupportive
clearly: how could the mind, lit up and possessed, find
energy for salvation’s befuddlement: to confront nothingness,
the best baffler, is to disengage monsters and prevent
390lofty identifications: to be saved is here, local and mortal:
everything else is a glassworks of flight: a crystal
hankering after the unlikely: futures on the next illusion:
order is the boat we step into for the crossing: when we
step out, nothingness welcomes us: inspiration spends through:
395by the snowroad the boulder floats afire: fir-bark,
skittering under a startled squirrel, falls in flames
34
rattling and flecks the burning snow: the moundhill wintered
lean lifts a shackling of cindery trees into the element
unending: the stream, drawing radiance, collects and casts
400the light, kindled glancing: mania dries with ash, the
oppressed grows weightless: doze/n th/rough c/and/or man/aged
leg/ions stud/ents: in hill-gold sun, mock orange branches