by A. R. Ammons
650be surrounded in a specified radial essential, which is difficult:
imagining withered conditions (for company), I think of
settled bulk, the ancient bristlecone, a sprout surviving
fanny: down South there: when they want to say magnificent they
say most-maggie-went-a-fishing: does’em good: have atchoo
655and a couple of belches: when I was a freckle-faced boy, said
they warn’t no freckles but fart bran from following cows:
said I was a redheaded woodpecker: I was redheaded: I been
humiliated: now, I’m a redheaded, woody pecker: stand
up, stand up for beauty, thou soldier of the breechjammed hole,
660garrison gates, thou wayfarer upon the breastworks and
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ramparts (ram parts), thou regular maker of meter, convivial iamb,
sleuthy sluice: halt, hut, two: what we believe in requires no
believing: if the axe falls on the toe, severance will
follow promptly: put the burner on Hi the coffee will boil:
665push down the fence it will no longer be standing: walk off
the cliff, air greets you: so much we do not need to
be urged to believe, we’re true, true believers with no
expenditure of will: to believe what runs against the
evidence requires belief—concentration, imagination, stubbornness,
670art, and some magic: the need to disbelieve belief so disbelief
can be believed: there are infidels only of fictions: not
a single temple has been raised to the fact that what is raised
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falls, yet that is the lesson: here’s my credo: if the merry-
go-round goes too fast it will be difficult to hold on: if you
675pull up the rosestock, you lose your hips: certitude plus:
everything in moderation including moderation: when you come
to know the eternal forces realizing themselves through form
you will need to lay on no special determination to assent
to what demands none: but if truth is colorless, fictions
680need be supreme, real supreme with hot-shot convincingness
and lashes laid on lavishly for the doubter, and, per
usual, regular dues: gentlemen of the naked vision, let us
see straight: here we are today and here we are not tomorrow:
if you kick the sand you are likely to raise some dust:
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685if you bite me in the ear, I will knee you in the nuts:
if you do something nice for me, I will feel encouraged to do
something nice for you: fight on my side, we fight together:
aleatory composition and choral improvisation throwback to
dinosaur lagoons, the much floating, winged sawbills,
690bankless, ambient figurings, dismemberments of breath by
overhanging fern-spun ramification: I hear the swirls of
morays, I think, breathing undersea, and see shadows
of mantas remora travel in: but which way is this distant—
a throwback or coming: I’m aware of the military-industrial
695complex and of lust for erosion: I hear in choral breakings
in and out clamoring gulls guzzling a clam shoal washed up
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rank: I hear us coming to a pass and just beyond the ridge
sawbills chirr circling an outbreak of undamageable light:
a single dot of light, traveling, will memorize the sphere:
700redemptions despise the reality: when may it not be our
task so to come into the knowledge of the reality as to
participate therein: wherever the imagined lands it’s
likely to brush up against a thorn and pop or get hit by
a bus on the freeway or at the minimum be thought flatulent:
705I wonder where all on what ledges, on what nordic heights
or high sinkages of meadow the aspen grows and where all
poplar breaks out in shivering testimonial under bright skies,
if along irrigation ditches, flat lengths into diminishment,
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regimentation of strict discipline, or at the edges of backwoods
710fields, off from the sight of anything save night’s night bird or
day’s night bird: I wonder where all seagulls follow the plow,
how far inland, or float serene in dislocation on sweetwater
lakes, I wonder where all along the bottoms of what hills the
roses open their brief and failing rages: ardency is a
715calf, butting and guzzling, let free to the cow: a luminous
saint reeling in the heights of objectless desire: hornets
after rain splitting out for lit flies: my heart shakes,
my eyes concentration’s flames, you my attention, absolute:
dust travels, gets up into the wind’s limbs and through
720stirrings and catchments makes itself available to new
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coherences, settles out, for example, carrying in microscopic
branches paramecium, virus, germ to damp stayings,
boom bloomings, gets going to return: leaves nothing lost:
the field widens—at the same time the essential begins
725to take shape: an immense victory unfolds before me: my
potassium-laced diet (jiggers of orange juice) will free me
from episodes of irregular heartbeats, premature ventriculations,
and the misimpressions ads for nonprescription painkillers
pain me with: I expect to promote good will and difficult
730clarities: I’m tired of bumfuzzlement and bafflement: and
I expect to give my friends who have found it impossible to
love me grounds for further trials: a big clinkery is a big
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cinder field or a clinkery of big cinders: a fish out of water’s
out for water: grief is all I know and joy all I understand:
735news item—search of creek nets no new results: today’s
radicalism is tomorrow’s triviality: but excellence,
one of the forming principles of the universe, is ever
radical: garrulity is harm enough even when, as here, it
finds harmless way: but novelty, like garrulity, is one
740of the forming principles, so much waste and ill-conceiving
before invention provides advancement to the ongoing:
for a form to complete everything with! orb: but this is the
procedure: if everything’s put in, the boundary bursts and
one is nowhere except picking up havoc’s fragments, things
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745nowise as shapely in their selfness as before: but
settling in the beginning for fency definition, that straight
reach across the variable field, chokes the pulse, bores
the tame, excludes the free rush of imagination except as
wind or as a small consistency like sand: the only bearable
750fence is the continuum, the scope of oneness under which
the proud ephemerals play discretely in their energizing
laws and play out, transformations taking their ways, bending
their boundaries, giving and losing: the outface of the
sphere, the skinny seat on infinity, this holding, this
755gentle stay in the bosom of reconciling but progressing
motions: the universes, they say, warp, bend, plunge into
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dark centers that blossom white into other spaces, but in
the slope and backwater of some ancient events, the meld
cools into solidifications, white roots lift green leafages,
760mold blooms pink and orange in the shade, and maggots race
like traveling waves in the ste
ms of brief, huge mushrooms:
in this open form there’s room enough for everything to find
its running self-concisions and expansions, its way, its
definition, down to the precious least: (when an image or
765item is raised into class representative of cluster, clump,
or set, its boundaries are overinvested, the supercharge is
explosive, so that the burden of energy overwhelms the matter,
and aura, glow, or spirituality results, a kind of pitchblende,
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radium, sun-like: and when the item is moved beyond class
770into symbol or paradigmatic item, matter is a mere seed
afloat in radiance: it is the mystery, if reasonable, that
when the one item stands for all, the one item is so lost
in its charge that it is no longer bounded but all radiance:
this is the source of spirit, probably, the simple result of
775the categorizing mind: the mind will forever work in this way,
and the spiritual, the divine, always be with us: in the
comprehensiveness and focus of the Most High is the obliteration
total that contains all and in that we rest, moving as we like
back into change and boundary and back: since these procedures
780will not change, we may think rescue omnipresent, a calming,
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and may exist in that really through the last change: a state
of mind can override the worst tendency and not, even in
surrender to the tendency, be false to its state: to live in
the shifts of facts, unorganized and dark, is to know only
785generation, mindless, fallen, senselessly repeating: things
work in these ways: deliverance a way they allow): what,
April 23rd and still not a daffodil: suddenly as if a
bright bird had passed, one is old: one dozes forgetful of what
one was for: a suspension of interrelationships: the reader is
790the medium by which one work of art judges another: hypnosis
is induced by focusing the attention: the trinket swings
or spins before the eyes, the normal flood of distractions
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that keeps one awake is drained, and the mind sinks into
simplified ease: the poem, its rhythm, is exclusive and hypnotic,
795too, but the poem keeps enough revelant variety going to interest
the mind from sleep but enough focus to disinterest it in
external matters: a hypnotic focus, then, that is awakening,
a focus of controlled fullness, not over-exclusiveness: but
the purpose of the motion of a poem is to bring the focused,
800awakened mind to no-motion, to a still contemplation of the
whole motion, all the motions, of the poem: this is very
different from hypnosis: a descent into the subconscious
(tentacles maybe into the unconscious) is prepared for not by
blotting out the conscious mind but by intensifying the alertness
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805of the conscious mind even while it permits itself to sink,
to be lowered down the ladder of structured motions to the
refreshing energies of the deeper self: but why is it of use
to be brought through organized motion from chaos and
ephemerality to no-motion: to touch the knowledge that
810motions are instances of order and direction occurring
briefly in the stillness that surrounds: to touch, to know,
to be measured and criticized by the silence, to acknowledge
and surrender to wholeness and composure: the non-verbal
energy at that moment released, transformed back through the
815verbal, the sayable poem: spirit-being, great one in the world
beyond sense, how do you fare and how may we fare to Thee:
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people set out to serve the people become those the people
serve: given the skinny poles of fact to theory, person to
man, event to continuum, how are we to develop intermediacy:
820what is to be done, what is saving: is it so to come to know
the works of the Most High as to assent to them and be reconciled
by them, so to hold those works in our imaginations as to think
them our correspondent invention, our best design within the
governing possibilities: so to take on the Reason of the Most
825High as to in some part celebrate Him and offer Him not our
flight but our cordiality and gratitude: so to look to the
moment of consciousness as to find there, beyond all the
individual costs and horrors, perplexing pains and seizures,
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joy’s surviving radiance: I ask because I am terrified of my
830arrogance and do not know and do not know if the point in the
mind can be established to last beyond the falling away
of the world and the dreams of the world: but if we are small
can we be great by going away from the Most High into our own
makings, thus despising what He has given: or can we, accepting
835our smallness, bend to cherish the greatness that rolls through
our sharp days, that spends us on its measureless currents: and
so, for a moment, if only for a moment, participate in those means
that provide the brief bloom in the eternal presence: is this
our saving: is this our perishable thought that imperishably
840bears us through the final loss: then sufficient thanks for that:
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there is a faculty or knack, smallish, in the mind that can turn
as with tooling irons immediacy into bends of concision, shapes
struck with airs to keep so that one grows unable to believe that
the piling up of figurements and entanglements could proceed from
845the tiny working of the small, if persistent, faculty: as if the
world could be brought to flow by and take the bent of
that single bend: and immediately flip over into the mirrored world
of permanence, another place trans-shaped with knackery: a brook in
the mind that will eventually glitter away the seas: and yet pile
850them all up, every drop recollected: a little mill that changes
everything, not from its shape, but from change: the faculty
then can be itself, small, but masterful in the face of size and
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spectacular ramification into diversity: (the way to have a following
is to get up in front of whatever is moving and start waving your
855arms): (sir, the piece you have sent me on poetic process and
psychotherapy errs not in being wrong but in being rudimentary: the
poetic consciousness beginning at a center works itself out by
incorporation until through craft, experience, insight, etc., it
brushes in a fulsome way against the fulsomeness of nature so that
860on the periphery it is so deeply spelt out that it can tangle with
the coincidental: this provides a growing edge to change and surprise
so that unexpectedness is constantly being fed into the engines of
assimilation and probability, giving shades of tone and air
to the probabilities that make them mean slightly adjusted things):
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865if raindrops are words, the poet is the cloud whose
gathering and withholding overspills generously and unmissed
from a great keeping: (depression, low pressure area): the
false poet is a white wisp that tries to wrest itself into
a storm: but the true storm moseys on with easy destructions
; 870like afterthoughts: how else but by greatness can the huge
presence exist between the gifty showers, twists and blow-outs:
on the way back from Northfield today (April 29, I’ve been
away a few days to Baltimore) I wrote a poem as follows:
when I go up into the mountains, I like to go up into the
875mountains: when I come down from the mountains, I like to
come down from the mountains: there has to be something ahead
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to like: it might as well be what is ahead: I found this
word repodepo in the newspaper only to find it, apparently,
a mischance of machinery: I could not myself have invented
880a nonexistence so probable, insignificance so well made: let
it stand for a made nothing, a pointer with no point: or
for anything about which the meaning is insecure: a heavy
registration: a cluster of empty pods, or a special phonetic
depot, or something that repods pseudopods: a leaf cannot
885appear on or fall from the branch except via the total
involvement of the universe: you and I cannot walk the street
or rise to the occasion except via the sum total of effect
and possibility of the universe: we are not half-in and
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