by A. R. Ammons
half-out of the universe but unmendably integral: when we
890move, something yields to us and accepts our steps: our
tensions play against, find rightness in, other tensions not
our own: we move into the motions with our tiny oars: there
are seas not oceans but invisible seas: they sustain,
they drown, but the abundance, the intricacy and dispersion,
895is glorious: hope lends silverness to that edge: having
been chastened to the irreducible, I have found the
irreducible bountiful: the daffodil nods to spring’s zephyr:
when the grackle’s flight shadows a streak of lawn, constellations
of possibility break out, for example, the multitude of
900grassblade shadows subsumed in a sweep: for example, an aphid
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resting in bugleleaf shade must think lost his discretion of
position: (his feelers notice, his eyes adjust): an ant
struck by the flashed alteration stops, the friction of which
event gives off a plume of heat, a small invisible boom:
905myriad chloroplasts circling the cell peripheries kick out
of photosynthetic gear and coast in a slough and many atoms
of carbon and nitrogen miss connection: if you dyed the grass
at day’s end, you’d see a white streak of starchless loss:
thermodynamics is inscrutable here: the coolant wings, heat
910currents, wind currents fanned into unpredictable motions:
when an immense afternoon darkbottomed thunderhead hoves rearing
over the ridge, you can imagine how unencompassing and flustered
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I get—night a full coming uninterrupted into difference: at
clarity of zooming, I’m unpassed in Cayuga Heights, unparalleled
915(nobody hanging on that wing, baby) possibly: at easing
into orbit grease, nuzzling right in there with not a touch
till the whole seal smacks: at that I’m unusually salient,
gritless in curvature with withal enthralling control,
perfection of adjustment, innocence of improvisation beginners
920and old strumpets of the spirit know: I don’t want shape:
I’ll have water muscles bending streams (recurrences of
curvature): wind sheets erect, traveling: lips accommodating
muscle glides: identity in me’s a black, clear bead: I’ve
strongboxed and sunk it, musseled and barnacled with locks,
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925but it’s breathing in there, a dumb eager little botch: I aim
absolutes at it so blasting, recoil and strike unnerve my
stability: (from so small a thing, what distant orbits I’ve
taken into residence) but it’s not now form against that form:
it’s motion: the renunciation of boxes, magicless: I’ll
930put the speck in soak, dissolve it, or pump fluids in so dense
flooding will work it out: what is its nature that has caused
so many engines, some fearful: I do not think bat or rat:
it’s a sprout child: it coos: it coos pink: the world and I
oppose it: it mustn’t see light as itself: it must appear
935dissolved, transfigured, or go down with the body it meant to
bloom into the various distractions of decay: then the little
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breath will die: then the locks, so many, will cast: to
that late funeral of my true self, no weeper will come,
hushing attendant, twelve-footed accompanist: then the small
940self will taste the ruin that has been my only food: (one
whose home is afire wanders): just now it’s 7:15 and
thunderstormy, blue deepened evening green, somewhat windy,
rain a likely solution: (when ground trash blooms all ways
at once like a flower, something has descended): though I
945have a bunch of potential any mush of which could sharpen
into cutting blooms, I sometimes lose definition tendencies
by looking out: look out: the tiny invites attention:
outward concentrations: (the poem reaches a stillness
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which is its form): crush a bug and the universe goes hollow
950with hereafter: in the cemeteries a shiver settles: sparrows
played down to speech in the cedar bunch into flowers:
across the valley a one-sided rim rises, highways like
caterpillars climb to the biting edge: the wings of red-ant
queens clamp flat macadam pools, the queens free-climbing
955mirrored trees to the extinction of overhead boughs: fear’s
a reservoir inscrutable rivers feed: I’m at the dammed
gate sizzling utterance: spending fear into any shape that
can manage the investment: cypress, weed, swallow-drink,
serpent-drink: to the huge air’s multiple fuzzy tongues
960I address vague hosannas: evaporation without arithmetic of
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loss: what a blessing: I have too much to weigh, shape
into meaningful expenditure: I need jars, jugs, hogsheads,
vials: here’s a drop to pierce your ear for: have a large
pendant with lesser spangles: send folks over: I have
965plenty to pass around: the right investment’s in decay,
decayable: brothers, fine brothers, be strong, be merry:
girls, she falcons, be thin: let us work ourselves asleep
against you: you are rocks that bend and flow, take in our
nervous edges: be the blossoms we spend into flower: I go
970on the confidence that in this whole magnificence nothing is
important, why should this be, yet everything is, even this
as it testifies to the changing and staying: as man, singular
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in certain kinds of feeling (we don’t know what shades of
feeling travel the weed) I know importances, love, grief,
975terror, that can retire nature into strangeness, but until
I get right enough to appreciate the lesser celandine by
the woodsroad, I have not achieved the calm necessary to the
joys of small riches, the briar bud bending out into the path:
feelings, feelings: conceptualization nowhere nears so accurate
980a source: nevertheless, except within the highrising dome,
canopy, reach of the forming intellect, feeling has no meaning,
no guidance, but stir, rush, the splintering cycles of small
beginnings and endings, the sui generations of particularity:
New York City can be grown over by birch brush: south of
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985Scranton, birch has covered the slag and shale heaps (terrains
of conical spills), the crevices catching dust and leaves,
roots and ice granulating edges: it will be lovely someday,
if left alone, and have a brook: I feel like a brook shedding
a hill, the glassy wide and the thick white falling, a
990scud-cover of moss, with a copse here and there of something
quailing, pine in a catchment moved high, a bear’s cold red
tongue sloshing in a runlet, and a deer’s eye shot with flight:
I am there pondering berries and the bear: my mind furnishes
a clear sky and smart wind: for me, there’s more death behind
995than ahead, though ahead lies the finish endless: the
seventeen-year-old self is gone and with it the well and
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wellsweep, chinaberry tree, the mother and father, the two
sisters, living but lost back there, and Silver, Doll, all
the jonquils, the smokehouse, mulberry tree, but when I was
1000las
t by, the pecan tree’s still standing, the same one, big,
the lean growths and lean shades vanished: more death done
than to do, except that memory grows, accumulating strata of
change, and the eyes close on a plenitude, suddenly, directly
into nothingness: so, in a sense, there’s more and more to do
1005with increasing reluctance: a world if not the world:
I am standing by the hill brook with the hill wife: but
where did all the mosquitoes come from: I’m tired of raw
nuts and berries and staying up late freezing with no
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television: you can’t keep visions selective enough: they
1010fill up with reality, too gravid grown to keep off the ground:
as we return to the dust from which we came, the gods die
away into the sky, the womb of gods: from the common
universalized materials we ascend into time and shape, hold our
outlines and integrations a while, then stiffen with the
1015accumulations of process, our bodies filters that collect
dross from the passages of air and water and food, and begin
to slow, crack, splinter, and burst: the gods from the high wide
potentials of aura, of encompassing nothingness, flash into
concentration and descend, taking on matter and shape, color,
1020until they walk with us, but divine, having drawn down with them
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the reservoirs of the skies: in time the restlessness that is in
them, the overinvestment, casts the shells of earth to remain with
earth, and the real force of the gods returns to its heights
where it dwells, its everlasting home: these are the mechanics
1025by which such matters carry out their awesome transactions:
if the gods have gone away, only the foolish think them gone
for good: only certain temporal guises have been shaken
away from their confinements among us: they will return, quick
appearances in the material, and shine our eyes blind with adoration
1030and astonish us with fear: the mechanics of this have to do with
the way our minds work, the concrete, the overinvested concrete,
the symbol, the seedless radiance, the giving up into meaninglessness
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and the return of meaning: but the gods have come and gone
(or we have made them come and go) so long among us that
1035they have communicated something of the sky to us making us
feel that at the division of the roads our true way, too,
is to the sky where with unborn gods we may know no
further death and need no further visitations: what may have
changed is that in the future we can have the force to keep
1040the changes secular: the one:many problem, set theory, and
symbolic signifier, the pyramid, the pantheon (of gods and
men), the pecking order, baboon troop, old man of the tribe,
the hierarchy of family, hamlet, military, church, corporation,
civil service, of wealth, talent—everywhere the scramble for
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1045place, power, privilege, safety, honor, the representative
notch above the undistinguished numbers: second is as good
as last: pyramidal hierarchies and solitary persons: the
hierarchies having to do with knowledge and law, the solitaries
with magic, conjuration, enchantment: the loser or apostate
1050turns on the structure and melts it with vision, with
summoning, clean, verbal burning: or the man at the top may
turn the hierarchy down and walk off in a private direction:
meanwhile, back at the hierarchy, the chippers and filers
hone rocks to skid together: the bottom rocks have much to
1055bear: the next level, if buoyed up from below, hardly less:
but the top rock, however nearly in significant flotation,
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is responsible for the symmetry of the whole, the office of
highsounding purpose, noble gesture, pulling together (by
which is meant pressing up though of course it’s pressing
1060down—but everyone below is willing to bear some weight if
it feels uplifting): the manager’s office is 14 × 20 and
the vice president’s 16 × 20 and the executive vice president’s
18 × 20 and the president’s 20 × 20 and the chairman of the board’s
the golf course or private jet: for identity and/or effect,
1065exclude the extraneous, which, though, leaves the identity
skimpy and the effect slight: great procedures move the
other way, inclusively, but with the hold back that when they
have everything they have nothing, an all-ness of identity
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and no effect, a calm, resolved effect: you can’t win: you
1070can strike balances and, for laughter or sublimity, imbalances
enough to keep the show going, but even at the midpoint of
perfect balances you can suspend oppositions which are no more
than self-cancellations: all identities and effects are
imbalances: but then you get into balancing imbalances,
1075the effect of most narrative: force mind from boxes to radiality:
the maple buds open into a basket of spangles, a vased bouquet:
greenish-yellow five-petaled flowers, not noticeable or attractive:
I wonder if maples depend on bees: I haven’t seen bee one: pulled
the old lawnmower out of the garage after a long winter and it
1080started right up, two good tugs on the spinning rope: cut the grass,
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first time of the year: real green grass: been raining so much
people can’t get to mowing and then when they do lawnmower chokes
up with blackgreen chunks and clumps, muffling the blade and stalling
the motor: yesterday (May 6) we drove up to Phil Booth’s house
1085and there he was: his wife, Margaret, too, his youngest daughter,
three dogs (all different kinds) and one cat: what a great day: he
cooked outdoor hamburgers and hotdogs: he has fossils in his rocks:
George (P.E.) was there, good old George, and Mary Emma: and others
all come to the picnic: a brook runs right through Philip’s
1090yard and falls over rocks, gets up and goes on: you can
stand on the rocks and not fall off in the water: the youngest
dog runs around and looks up at you as if wondering what
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is so surprising: intense and quizzical: I wonder why dogs
haven’t learned more in all these years: they take the proper
1095attitude: what is true service: the true question: or of
the many services, which ones are most nearly true: it
must be a service that is celebration, for we would celebrate
even if we do not know what or how, and for He is bountiful if
slow to protect and recalcitrant to keep: what we can celebrate
1100is the condition we are in, or we can renounce the condition
we are in and celebrate a condition we might be in or ought
to be in: should we like the saint, ascetic, or priest spurn
the world, sensuous and sensual, and celebrate those longings
in us, sweet heights, that seem the potential of a necessary
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1105coming: or should we fall to the pleasures and raggednesses
so relentlessly and opulently provided here, the flappings of
the flesh, the ghostly agonies, the long bleak streaks, commitment
to love’s threshing flesh brings on:
do we celebrate
most truly when we fall into our limitations, accept our
1110nothingness of years, spawn, beget, care for, weep, fail, burn,
slobber, suck, stroke, dream, shake, sleep, eat, swim, squirm:
does He forgive us, does he accept our celebration, when we turn
away from the fruits given and hunger after Him—the
arrogance!—His silver and immortal agencies: will He not afflict
1115us with loss of life in life with nothing later of another kind:
when we take the needy hand in hand, when the tear humbles
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us with horrible splendor, when tenderness is fully placed
in the human eye, we find service exceeding body into sky:
when anxiety rises words too start to stir rising into schools,
1120moving into sayings (a recourse, though delusional) like winds
making up before a mild May-evening thunderstorm, the winds
spilling across the trees, then like surf sucking back in a
growing tug: at such times, I pick up a tape, stick the end
into my typewriter, and give everything a course, mostly
1125because in a storm course is crucial and in proportion to the
storm must be fought for, insisted on: I’ve weathered a batch
of storms: the words rising from behind the palings of
the back fence, getting loose and showering up from the points