by A. R. Ammons
95
of maple leaves, shaking loose in wind-defined drifts
1130of elm seed, take on configuration of motion and spiel
out into spelling: the few drops of rain have put a fizz
on the street and the cars go by in splitting noticeability:
I just finished planting the pole beans, the zucchini and
cucumbers and transplanted the pepper plants, asters, and
1135petunias: I had the best time: and after the first shower,
the catbird lit on the top bar of the jungle gym and ripped
off a few bars, as if a surprise announcement: but I know
where that bird’s nest is and how quiet it’s been around
there this month: I like to think the bird just went
1140out of his mind with all the rising and fell afloat of it
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with a singing: that’s the way I do it when I do, and I
know the bird’s meaning at least in coming to my own: all
the greens, a company of differences, radiant, the source
sunk, the mellowing left-over light suffusing: I thought
1145I saw a piece of red paper in the grass but it was a
cardinal: and I thought I saw a clump of quince blossoms
move but that was a cardinal: one morning three orioles
were in the green-red quince bush: that was what it was:
the pear tree looks like lime sherbet with whipped cream
1150topping: the bottom part all leaves and no blossoms and
the top part all blossoms and no leaves: a green sailboat
or a spring mountain, from tree-green to conic, glacial white:
97
the work of the staying mind is to burn up or dissolve the day’s
images, the surface falling of pear petals or of hailstones
1155from the blue bottoms of thunderheads at sea, the curling up and
vanishing or the plopping and melting: for the mind, large as its
surface is, hasn’t room for the spreading out of each day’s
images to the hard edges: so the subterranean fires of the mind
float upward into the day’s business and here and there like
1160volcanoes burn through into dream meldings, the hard
edges turning inward then moving out assuming their own
foliages and lineations, essentialized: the white hot mouth spewing
up islands recovered to the conscious mind: in this way all the
sensory bits are made available in symbolical assimilations ready to
98
1165train the mind through its surprises and commonplaces: I am
waiting for the evening star to appear in the windowpane but
the sun’s still a ruddy burnishing fire in the lower branches of the
tamarack: this afternoon I thought Jove had come to get me: I walked
into a corridor of sunlight swimming showering with turning shoals
1170of drift pollen and not yet knowing it was pollen thought perhaps I
was being taken or beamed aboard but saw over the roof the high
swags
of the blue spruce swaying and felt stabilized from wonder:
I would still rather beget (though I can’t, apparently) than be
begotten upon, I think I’m almost sure, but I don’t know that a vague
1175coming of a shimmery gold floating would be so bad: I sneezed: my
eyes watered: the intimacy was sufficient: nothing is separate:
99
there’s the evening star and two jets blazing sunlit vapor trails:
stentorian: tendentious: sonorous: orotund: the moon’s up:
however provisional the procedure, tentative the thought, the
1180days clang shut with bronze finality: days wherein we wavered
studiously with uncertainty, went this way a way and that way a
way, thought twice, take on the hard and fast aspect of the
finished, the concluded fact, thus misrepresenting us: and then
there is at the end the stone that makes it all look purposeful
1185and deliberate, what was hesitation, gaping, and wondrous
turning around: life takes on the cast of decision and seeds
the ground with marmoreal memento: stone outcroppings in the
pasture like sheep resting: I’m glad the emphasis these days
100
is off dying beautifully and more on a light-minded living with
1190the real things—soap, spray-ons, soda, paper towels, etc.—for
indelicacy taints taking oneself too seriously and saving life
up to close with a serene finish: I expect to die in terror:
my mother did: old songs (hymns) erupted from her dying
imaginations: they say she sang them blurred for two nights
1195before the interval of clearing that preceded her majestic
drawing away: my father’s heart burst finally and he coasted
off, a cool drifting out of course: these destinations we
think we do not wish to attain: unsettling flurries and
disconnections, hurries and worries, strictures and
1200besiegings like preparations for camping out: driven, I go
101
into high and drive as fast as I can: driving faster than
I’m driven I can keep the forces aligned and taut but if
a holiday comes along and I try to slow down for vacation,
I swerve a lot, meander and hassle, my driver drives over
1205my driving, an overdrive taken over by overtaking, hopeless,
hapless helplessness: better trim the quince bush now before
the thorns of new growth harden: or come fall there’ll be a
further periphery-thicket of spines: maybe one isn’t supposed
to trim while the shoots are still purplish and tender:
1210doing it now may bleed and depress the bush to death: but
meanwhile, while doing it, I find the placid quince rage
enticing: by now the old periphery of blossom and nub-green
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quince is inward in an exceeded stratum: even though the bush
has put on the strain of blossoming and fruiting, it has
1215at the same time shot out shoots all over, threatening the
upcoming hollyhock and lemon lilies: a green rage to possess,
make and take room: to dominate, shade out, whiten: I
identify with the bush’s rage, its quiet, ruthless, outward
thrust: whatever nears me must shrink, wither up, or widen
1220overlarge and thin with shade, ambition the size of the room
I need to unfold into: but cunning and deviousness are at
work at the quince bush: morning glory stock is underground,
ready to shoot up a spear of leaving through the quince’s
underbrush and by fast moving to overcrown the bush tops
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1225and take the light away: look at the smooth-cut lawn, how
even and gentle: but finger through the turf, the nap,
and there are the brown twists of clover, veronica, plantain,
grass in a striving: it is hard to stand up crowding full
into a full unfolding: being’s terror: I wonder if we
1230should pick the gems out of the reliquary crowns and
give to the poor, boons and munificences showering, plenty
of meat, wines medicinal, soothing beer, classic pretzels:
I wonder if we should shave the gold from the gold reliquary
beards and cast it to flurries of gleaning: or melt down
1235the artful forms, float off the dross, and mold the gold
or stamp it into guinea suns: then the poor could have
104
their operations, pay off their loans, and thrive with comfort:
&n
bsp; the babies could get fresh milk and the lovers could propose:
(but if we demolish the past’s imposing achievements, hold
1240away only the lyre upon which we can plink immediacy): scared
sacred: how dark it gets before the hail starts! lightning
fries in quick crisps, thunder splits and cleaves open into
booming crumbling walls that jar the ground: then the perfect
ice spheres from the high world come down in a bounding
1245rustle, some remnants of thunder far along the periphery
grumbling: lightning strikes close and lightbulbs sear
in their sockets and flick out: then the heavy rain brushes
in on wind gusts at the windows: a drenching too demonstrable
105
for poppies, all twenty-eight heads half-closed with bending
1250over and drooping: for a long time the eaves-gutter,
lightening, keeps a mesh of seed-ice, the milky cores:
because of the holdings of its many needlepoints, every one
drop-bulbed, the long shags of the blue spruce lie into one
another like shoals of high moss and a weatherless shower
1255ticks on for hours after rain: slowly the boughs lighten,
loosen, jar and sprinkle apart: a thousand acres of those
trees could suspend a shower and turn it into an all-day
soak: that would be good for the brooks whereby the rocks
had refused all but a wetting: mediations soften the
1260extremities without changing their quantities, merely
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translating times: getting to know your philosophy, finely
rational and small, is like coming into a city and finding
a trellis, precise, consistent, which after all only holds
up a bush: some people when they get up in the morning see
1265the kitchen sink, but I look out and see the windy rivers
of the Lord in the treetops: you have your identity when
you find out not what you can keep your mind on but what
you can’t keep your mind off: mind, many sided, globe-like,
rich with specification and contrariety, is secure from
1270slogans, fads, starved truths, and propaganda—defeats itself,
meanwhile shoring itself up with sight and insight: how to
devise a means that assimilates small inspirations into a
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large space, network, reticulation complex (almost misleading)
but moved forward by a controlling motion, design, symmetry,
1275suasion, so that harmony can be recognized in the highest
ambience of diversity: in a single day, one may “hear” a small
connection, an interesting phrase, but to what can each day’s
stock be added: what is the measure to accommodate the
diverse impressions, moods, intuitions: in the right scope
1280any fragment fits: since we can’t, apparently, have whole
motions of mind through the higher reaches (sufficiently
impregnated with the concrete), we turn to the unit to
represent the universal: but while we can hope to arrive at
the definition of essence through the unit, we can never in
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1285that way satisfy the other capacity of the mind to achieve
definition by ordered accumulations, massive suasions: if
nothing shaped stays and shapelessness is dwellingless, where
can we dwell: as shapes (bodies) we dwell only in the flow
of shapes, turning the arcs of mortality: but the imagination,
1290though bodiless, is shaped (being the memory or imagined
memory of shapes) and so can dwell in nothingness: the human
being is as inscrutable and unformulable as a poem, or, if
possible, more so: the gas station attendant has a bottomless
well in him, too—shoots from his brain down his spine, breaks
1295into incredible ramification, the same as bottomless: we
have our definitions, imperfect, but all we have: around them,
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though, and running through, and immensely more vast, the
indefinable, the source of possibility: acme came: speaking
with “the flower of the mind” gets pollen up my nose: how
1300to give up the life of words for life: just now (June 6 in
the dusk) only a few dozen flowers are left on the honeysuckle
bush, the flowers like the pink, sprung mouths of tiny vipers:
thunder shakes pennies out of stack: if one follows the western
littoral of Africa northward, one moves up past Walvis Bay
1305to Sorris Sorris and, rounding out westward and turning back
in again, to Benguela and Lobito and then way on up, swerving
out again slightly westward, to Port Gentil and then sharply
west to Cape Palmas and on up and around to Sidi Ifni and
110
past the gaping Strait and on up past Oporto and, crossing
1310water, to Brest and then through certain colder finaglings
one turns into the other side of the world along Siberian
shores to the Bering Strait and, switching, descends along
the western littoral of North America: if all else fails,
try hocus-pocus to bring your writing into focus: for sun,
1315moon are out of joint until you bring them to a point: cry
Muse! and if you cannot reach her, bleed some juice from a
writing teacher: bad images are bad but what is worse is
verse loose where it should be terse: verse would be, except
for magic, dull as life and twice as tragic: the shortest
1320route to adulation is to skirt your education: in need to be
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diminished, I sought out peaks and stars and at my cost
sang them high and bright: you don’t have to be superhuman
to survive—let go and let your humanity rise to its natural
height, said the star, and you will in that smallness be as
1325great as I: so I sat down and sang and mountains fell and
at last I knew my measurable self immeasurable: the weak
rigs a universe against himself, then overstrives to keep
himself—but nothing is set up, nobody cares, it’s all right
for him to come out, shine a little and love his light:
1330aspirations (misdirections) move in the upper branches of
the mind like vine vipers, slender, loopy, slithery:
notice the highest cranes reach into the deepest pits:
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therefore, if my slat-steel triangulations of abstraction
and strict cables surprise and dismay you on the landscape,
1335think how from under the foundations the waters of life
may rise to meld with mirrors and wave the cranes away:
think of that: for such the elegance of my uprisings: what
is deep to come to, being overlaid with too much stone of
fear, suggests high drills: the little red squirrel dashes
1340out onto the thin branches, picks a maple seed, and dashes
back to the cover of bigger branches: nibbles out the
greenmeal seed then drops the wing into asymmetrical flutters,
not the nosewing-spin of the true event: semblance with no
journey: terrors bluster with undercutting sweeps, or pelt
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1345with staying fragmentation (hail on the spring garden) through
or in the mind, the swirlings of imbalanced loops between
highs and lows, just like weather predictions and actual
storms over average landscapes: one terror mind brings on
itself is that anything can b
e made of anything: if there are
1350no boundaries that hold firm, everything can be ground into
everything else: the mind making things up, making nothing
of what things are made of: scary to those who need prisons,
liberating to those already in: that this dismissal is
possible, no more recalcitrance within or without, slides our
1355surfaces and disturbs our deeps: the poppies are all gone:
the tulips were all gone last week: we have lemon lilies now,
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some iris, some spirea still white where it’s mostly brown: we
have four hills of mound-building ants: two hills are on the
lawn and regularly get their hills sliced off: one hill is
1360under the four-legged merry-go-round: I have to clip under
there so I leave it alone: one mound is just between the
blacktop and shrubs, on a slight incline, so it’s safe from
the lawnmower: I notice the ants have two primary visible
duties: some ants bring little dried bits, castings from maple
1365bloom, dried strips of grass, even green clover leaves and deposit
them on top of the mound: meanwhile, other ants bring up pellets
of soil, and a weaving betwixt them takes place which the rain,
short of destroying, glues and seals: they are interesting ants: