by A. R. Ammons
swim windy shadows, like lean fish in glass, against the
windowpanes: a golden dream swims with the light, schools
405of thoughts turning, bunching, heading down, up: nothing is
wrong: all is carrying over: the windowpanes flow with shapes,
fish in a glassen clarity: snowsqualls interrupt but return
the shaking moment: the dream sets off for the sufficient journey:
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the safety engineers complain that the people are numb
410along the fault line and will not survive if they do not
respond to warning signals: maybe so: but how
have we survived at all but by numb nonchalance: to know
and care is to take victory out of the moment when a
moment’s victory is what everything is for, apparently:
415still, there’s no sense in being stupid: floors can
collapse, flopping pancakes, and too much wavering,
even, in the heights can bring files and bookshelves down
on folks: does just a little forethought so diminish the
impulse: must the stadiums, gymnasiums, and grade schools
420be put right on the line: still the people know: a
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few thousand can be spared, but life can’t be compromised:
there are so many dangers and possibilities of danger that
even if you entertained them one at a time you’d still be
numb to most of them: but there’s no need to be perversely
425careless: according to the World Book, the Jabiru wades
the swamps of South America, and the Jaçana’s a relative of,
or looks a lot like, the gallinule, of which I, in a recent
unpublished poem, spoke briefly: I which suggests eye
really derives from a symbol for the hand: and K stands
430for the palm or open hand: and J, you know, is just another
form of I: that whole IJK cluster is one of my favorites
in the alphabet, and I specially like the JK vol of the WB:
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you take me: I never used the word rink in my work nor
tosh as in turgid tosh nor slipup, backswing, tocsin,
435discinct, skin-flint, razzmatazz: thank the Lord:
if the world wears out, there are still shenanigans left in
the lingo, more compiled than the world around here which
is mostly winter: but the old quince bush looking like
a mess of last year’s baling wire is putting out the redbud
440so much that the dry intertwining morning glory vine is
starting to look ridiculous: but those vines outlined so
many beginnings of snow last fall and this spring! and
may yet again so outline the snow, that is, provide a
catchment with configuration no different from the
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445catch itself: most of our writers live in New York City
densely: there in the abstractions of squares and glassy
floors they cut up and parcel out the nothingness they
think America is: I wish they would venture the rural and
see that the woods are undisturbed by their bothering
450reputations and that the brooks have taken to flowing
the way they always have and that the redwing pauses
to consider his perch before he lights in a cedar:
I never saw more birds than this cold spring: they are
intervaled foliages to the branchy bushes and trees, so
455many comings-in and flyings-out summer and winter mix
in a minute: I don’t know their names, leaves that make
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their own wind of shrieks and whistles: but there’s a
bluish small roll of garden wire in the edge of the woods
that shows no sign of sprouting, however naturalized,
460the robin striking leaves over by it and staring: leave
it there long enough, it will start to function, a
protective tangle, a harbor or arbor to centipede or
vine, a splinterer of gusts: Apollo 16 just blasted
off: it’s 1400 miles downrange at 16,000 mph, orbit
465established: a stirring bit of expenditure there in the
blastoff into freefall’s silent, floating speed: hurry back,
boys: look out your window at North America: I’m right
under that big cloud: it hasn’t budged in six months:
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John and I drove out to check the paint job on the propjet,
470Mohawk merging with Allegheny and losing its emblems and
identifications, such as colors, black and gold, and the
head of the Indian chief on the tail assembly, to the white
and blue streaks, with red lettering, of Allegheny: as
part of his commitment to the baggage man, John stood out
475by the wire fence in the pouring rain until the second
engine started to spin and the passenger door went up: then
we stood under a shelter with our hands over our ears while
the plane taxied out on the runway: just then it occurred
to me how much I dislike weekends and how pleasant it would
480be to pull Sundays in particular out of the calendar and
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add a longish month to June: this measure, maw, can grind
up cancers and flourish scarfs of dandelions, manage the
pulp of hung ticks and be the log the stream flows against
for a whole year: its mesh can widen to let everything
485breeze through except the invisible: it can float the
heaviest-bloodied scalding dream and sail it into the high
blue loops of possibility: it can comprise the dull
continuum of the omnium-gatherum, wait and wait, without
the alarm of waiting, getting as much being out of motion
490as motion out of being: multiple and embracing, sweet
ingestion, the world bloat, extension pushed to the popped
blossoming of space, the taking of due proportion’s scope:
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I think my problems no classier than anyone else’s, though:
closure ends all shows, the plain strict and the frowzy
495brilliant: and if we go, separately but all together,
to nondistinction, we might as well make as much distinction
here as we can: the proud fall, right, but the great fall
came before, and when one knows he’s going out, can we
blame him for shoving the voltage up: I wake in the morning
500fairly level with the tide: the dust feels right on my
tongue: but in no time a trifle or two, tardy toast, ice
on the windshield, the crusty vestments of day, I veer off
into classic compensation, a vision or two shot anger-high,
a little gilded scaffolding toward unreal floors, so I get
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505home at night and go to bed like a show folding: it’s
great to get back in the water and feel time’s underbuoys,
the cradling saliences of flux, re-accept and rock me off;
then, in nothingness, sinking and rising with everyone not
up late: the plenitude: it’s because I don’t want some
510thing that I go for everything: all the people asleep with
me in sleep, melted down, mindlessly interchangeable,
resting with a hugeness of whales dozing: dreams nudge us
into zinnias, tiger lilies, heavy roses, sea gardens of
hysteria, as sure of sunlight as if we’d been painted by
515it, to it: let’s get huzzy dawn tangleless out of bed,
get into separateness and come together one to one: you
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who are showless and self-full,
be generous, come by, offer
me a chat: I’d trade my shows in any day for the real thing:
meanwhile, amusement, a waiting amusement, is my study—I
520hope you will take it at no other level: this measure moves
to attract and hold attention: when one is not holding one,
that is a way of holding: dip in anywhere, go on until the
attractions fail: I angle for the self in you that can be
held, had in a thorough understanding: not to persuade you,
525enlighten you, not necessarily to delight you, but to hold
you: the lofty, shot high by constraint, adopt the rigor
of scary levitation, grow icy by the swirl of fear as much
as by the vacant, sizable view, but sometimes imagine they
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are flying: but the mirrorments, astonishments of mind,
530what are they to the natural phenomena, the gross destructions
that give life, we cooling here and growing on a far outswing
of the galaxy, the soaring, roaring sun in its thin-cool
texture allowing us, the moon vacant though visitable, Mars
not large enough to hold an air, Venus too hot, so much
535extravagance of waste, how can the bluegreen earth look
purposeful, turn a noticeable margin to meaning: what are
mirrorments, then, so shatterable, liable to melt, too
much light, the greasy graying of too much time: man waited
75,000 years in a single cave (cold, hunger, inexplicable
540visitation of disease) only to rise to the bright, complex
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knowledge of his destruction! that heaviness weighs down,
lacking an interpenetrating spiritual float: but were men,
starting out three million years ago, calling up to us:
if they were not able to call up to us, what was in them able
545to call them up: what was the hidden, interior elixir that
glided them along the ground, gave them the speech of staring
into their dumfounded hands: or did they turn in each day’s
light, storming the world for food and place, merely and
sufficiently: when we have made the sufficient mirror will
550it have been only to show how things will break: know thyself
and vanish! and the knowledge not for itself or the self
but so the ambience may call itself vacantly expressed,
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fully exfoliated, empty! sunrise this morning was not
a fraction: it was self-full, whole in motion: the man
555falling asleep in the cave winters of time ago swayed
into the fullness, assumed the measure: we are as in a
cone of ages: each of us stands in the peak and center
of perception: around us, in the immediate area of recent
events, the planets make quickly-delivered news and the sun
560acquaints us of its plumes eight minutes old: but then
the base widens dropping back and down in time through
the spinal stars of spirals and deepens broadening into
the core of our configuration with its ghostly other side:
and then the gulfs and deepenings begin and fall away
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565through glassy darkness and shadowy mind: antiquity on
antiquity the removes unveil, galaxies neighbors and foreign
cousins and groups of galaxies into the hazy breadths and
depths the telescope spells its eye to trace: but here
what took its beginning in the farthest periphery of event,
570perception catches the impact of and halts to immediacy,
the billion-year-old flint light striking chemical changes
into the eye: behold: the times break across one
another like waves in surfy shoals and explode into the
white water of instantaneous being: each of us stands in
575the cone of ages to collect the moment that breaks the
deeper future’s past through: each of us peak and center:
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who owns nothing has everything and who owns something
has that: snow’s a reservoir spring springs with leaks,
interminglings of onrush and withholding: how close middle
580comes to the middle of the dictionary: make a mighty
force, that of a god: endow it with will, personality, whim:
then, please it, it can lend power to you: but then you
have created the possibility of its displeasure: what you
made to be greater than you is and enslaves you and then
585suppose trying to be free again you begin upward desperate
identifications until those identifications enlarge beyond
you and terrify you and move you out of the frame of actual
gestures: take my advice: the forces are there all right
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and mostly beyond us but if we must be swayed by the forces
590then at least let’s be the only personalities around, the
sort of greatness a raft in a rapids is and at the top
let’s put nothingness, good old: the most open suasion:
a darkness in the method, a puzzling, obfuscating surface,
is the quick (and easy) declaration of mystery, with the risk,
595though, that should the method come plain, be made out, the
mystery, surficial, its elements jumbled, would disappear,
unless, of course, under the quick establishment of difficult
method the true mystery survived: it’s not necessarily true
that things left to themselves go to pieces: without the help
600of human hand, for example, far from the scaffolding of the
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human imagination, old (presumed) Chaos stirred in himself,
spirals (cellular whirlwinds), upward swoops of bending aspiration,
collisions high with potentials of linkage, dissolvings and
meldings lengthy and free—these “motions” brought particles
605into progression often: if the progressions often failed into
tatterdemalions, do-funnies, whatchamacallits, and thingumbobs,
there was time enough in the slow motions of landforms, oceans,
of moon and sun for Chaos to undo and recommence: certain
weaves caught on to random hooks and came into separation and
610identity: and found ways to cause the causes of origin to
recur with increasing frequency: one must be careful not to bestow
intention where there may have been no more (much) than jostling
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possibility: keep jiggling the innumerable elements and
even integrations can fall out of disintegrations: in any case,
615physicochemical phenomena account sufficiently for the
output up to now: but all movements are religious: inside
where motions making up and rising turn about and proceed,
node and come to pass, prayer is the working in the currents,
hallelujahs dive and sculp the mud, mazes of mud melting away
620from the slurpy lifting loads: when the mob goes wild and thrashes
a bit copulating, shaking the bushes, it is moving in service:
when one screams in terror of the Most High, he is asserting
his hunger for the merely usual and mortal, for the circum-
scription of place: the polar bear snarling or running,
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625diving or sleeping, attunes to the accuracy of the imperative:
sketchiness and incompleteness, broken gestures, stuttering
intentions, fact blanching and breaking fiction, seizures
of cold and pied heat, these are prayerful realizations of
disorientation, holy efforts to acce
pt or change: nothing,
630not even the least (the half-step or stalled intention) is
without the rigor of knowing: how to be saved: what is
saving: come to know the motions with what rightness, accuracy,
economy, precision they move and identify the motions of the
soul with them so as to find the self responsive to and in
635harmony with the body of motions: morality is not a judgment
on action but acting rightly, truly—total, open
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functioning: how to make the essential fashionable is the
problem without promoting boredom for there is little variation
day to day in the essential and, worse, when the fashionable
640hangs on it loses the quality of the fashionable: of course
we are sure that the fashionable relates only peripherally
to the essential so that it is nearly certain that to be
fashionable is not to be essential: there is the aspect,
though, of change that it is constant so that always to be
645fashionable is to participate in the lasting: problems
problems: the essential without specification is boring
and specification without the essential is: both ways out
leaves us divided but so does neither way: unless—and here
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is the whole possibility—both essential and fashionable can