by A. R. Ammons
115
I was pulling veronica out of the lawn when this hornet came
1370up upon my squatted self, buzzed around my anklebones inquiringly
and then buzzingly persisted about my face and neck: that was
a few days ago: then he did it the next day: and the next: but
today when he did it, I retreated into the house: he followed me
and got caught between the door and the screen: the screen door
1375was ajar and when he got in the groove, I closed the door crushingly:
I took him by the wing to the mound builders: they hassled him
down the side part way, for some reason, and commenced to pierce
and suck him: I am sorry, of course, but the veronica has to
be pulled, as I don’t want to use funny sprays that might poison
1380the worms and birds: killing to save perplexes: just facts,
116
just bits: let’s, as if sore, grab a few things from the flood,
from the imagination’s burning everything up into the contours
of staying: or let us, before the transfusions commence, hamper
the imagination with full freightages of recalcitrance, cripple
1385it short of any transmutation that avoids the massive registration:
if the burn’s to be true, let it be the real: nor let us guide
too much the proceeding but be carefully in it when it goes: we
must come out on the other side, on our feet and ready to ride:
this drawn fellow said he was quartered, split two ways,
1390horizontally and vertically, by the horizontal into height and
depth and by the vertical into left and right: said he tried
to live in one half only to find it halved: these terrible
117
partitions interested him in unity: he wanted all of himself
together but each quadrant felt defiant and exclusive: he
1395looked for the coordinate only on finding it to find it
represented by zero: a terrible bind that made him at least
attentive: very much aware, he could give many sides to any
argument: we all thought that largeness a spark of divinity:
we told him everything has a cost but he rejoined he would
1400settle for something less expensive: the poem insists on
differences, on every fragment of difference till the fragments
cease to be fragmentary and wash together in a high flotation
interpenetrating much like the possibility of the world: the
poem wants every fragment clear but a fragment until, every
118
1405fragment taken into account, the fragments will be apprehended
to declare a common reality past declaration: a fragment is
a person, edgy with difference, fearful of broadsweep
elimination: interpenetration is a welling up of fresh deeps
of tolerance and consideration: I beg the liberty of such
1410edges and wells to function and of fearful concision to relax
its boundaries inclusively: if one would preserve the integrity
of his going, his taut conveyance (bright and trim), he must
be willing to give over to indirection: if in the South
Atlantic one selects the prime meridian as an ideal northward
1415voyage, one runs into difficulty in the progression: at Accra
or thereabouts one must abandon ship and hire elephants or
119
Fiats and proceed at a lumbering or sizzling pace: and
somewhere around Upper Volta it will be necessary to get
camels ready (and do something with the elephants, put them
1420in keep for the return trip or dispose of them by sale,
shot, or wilderness), packed with figs, dates, and curd,
and around Oran find a marketplace to trade the spitting
camels off for ships again, a short voyage, and then onto
land: before ships again, there will be dogsleds and
1425finally seals slipping off chunks of sea-ice: bend out
and around and in in order to keep familiar rudder and sail
at hand: when poetry was a servant in the house of religion,
it was abused from all angles, buggered by the fathers,
120
ravished by the mothers, called on to furnish the energies
1430of entertainment (truth) for the guests, and made, at the
same time, a whipping-post for the literal: poetry is not
now a servant in the house of religion, the matter having
become clear who got what from which: if you wish to get
religion now you will have to come and sit in poetry’s
1435still center, bring your own domestic help, and resort to
your own self-sustainment: if, leaving center, you make
uses of poetry, you must represent them as uses, not as the
true life, and in recognition of that you must dress your
uses in rags as an advertisement that violations are underway:
1440no more hocus-pocus derived from images and lofty coordinations:
121
if you want to drain a place, don’t begin on the marshy side:
you’ll get your feet wet and every time you trench, water will
run in hiding your trench depth: begin on the other side
of the clog where the ground may be crumbly dry and where you
1445can work without sloshing and then you can at last break into
the water and see it start from dead holding into motion’s
declarations and extensions: if you do everything with
economy and attention, the work itself will take on
essentialities of the inevitable, and you will be, if causing,
1450participating in grace: the aspects will concur in one motion:
when the water breaks into the trench, notice spells of
jerking in the water’s head, caused by the uneven angles and
122
depths of shoveling: but soon the water will find a smooth
current compensating for the ragged edges, and you may feel
1455that the water itself, as if grateful, is joining to complete
your work: attention enters in: I can’t understand my readers:
they complain of my abstractions as if the United States of America
were a form of vanity: they ask why I’m so big on the
one:many problem, they never saw one: my readers: what do they
1460expect from a man born and raised in a country whose motto is E
pluribus unum: I’m just, like Whitman, trying to keep things
half straight about my country: my readers say, what’s all
this change and continuity: when we have a two-party system,
one party devoted to reform and the other to consolidation:
123
1465and both trying to grab a chunk out of the middle: either we
reconcile opposites or we suspend half the country into
disaffection and alienation: they want to know, what do I
mean quadrants, when we have a Southeast, Northeast, Southwest,
and Northwest and those cut into pairs by the splitting
1470Mississippi and the Mason-Dixon line: I figure I’m the exact
poet of the concrete par excellence, as Whitman might say:
they ask me, my readers, when I’m going to go politicized or
radicalized or public when I’ve sat here for years singing
unattended the off-songs of the territories and the midland
1475coordinates of Cleveland or Cincinnati: when I’ve prized
multeity and difference down to the mold under the leaf
124
on the one hand and swept up into the perfect composures of
/> nothingness on the other: my readers are baffling and
uncommunicative (if actual) and I don’t know what to make of
1480or for them: I prize them, in a sense, for that: recalcitrance:
and for spreading out into a lot of canyons and high valleys
inaccessible to the common course or superhighway: though I
like superhighways, too, that tireless river system of streaming
unity: my country: my country: can’t cease from its
1485sizzling rufflings to move into my “motions” and “stayings”:
when I identify my self, my work, and my country, you may
think I’ve finally got the grandeurs: but to test the center
you have to go all the way both ways: from the littlest
125
to the biggest: I didn’t mean to talk about my poem but
1490to tell others how to be poets: I’m interested in you, and
I want you to be a poet: I want, like Whitman, to found
a federation of loveship, not of queers but of poets, where
there’s a difference: that is, come on and be a poet, queer
or straight, adman or cowboy, librarian or dope fiend,
1495housewife or hussy: (I see in one of the monthlies an astronaut
is writing poems—that’s what I mean, guys): now, first of
all, the way to write poems is just to start: it’s like
learning to walk or swim or ride the bicycle, you just go
after it: it is a matter of learning how to move with
1500balance among forces greater than your own, gravity, water’s
126
buoyance, psychic tides: you lean in or with or against the
ongoing so as not to be drowned but to be swept effortlessly
up upon the universal possibilities: you can sit around
and talk about it all day but you will never walk the tightwire
1505till you start walking: once you walk, you’ll find there’s
no explaining it: do be afraid of falling off because it is
not falling off that’s going to be splendid about you, making
you seem marvelous and unafraid: but don’t be much afraid:
fall off a few times to see it won’t kill you: O compatriotos,
1510sing your hangups and humiliations loose into song’s
disengagements (which, by the way, connect, you know, when
they come back round the other way): O comrades! of the
127
seemly seeming—soon it will all be real! soon we will know
idle raptures (after work) leaning into love: soon all our
1515hearts will be quopping in concert: hate’s fun, no doubt
about that, tearing things up and throwing them around and
ending some: but love is a deep troubling concern that rises
to the serenity of tears in the eyes: prefer that: hold
hands: help people: don’t make a big fuss and embarrass
1520them, and if your empathy is right you won’t, but help people
where the message is that it’s called for: and when you’re
tired out, write songs about hate’s death and love’s birth:
you’ll get it straight, you’ll see: the mind: a periscope
in the perilous scope, rises from comforting immersions in
128
1525what sways good and feels fine, the plush indulgences like
ledges or canyon scarps rimmed with spring’s finery of bush,
the creams and jellies of reverie, and looks abroad for a
reassuring scope to sweetness or for the oncoming, if
distant, catastrophe that will return it to the pudding
1530of change, the mind’s own describing and roving fire
drowned from shapening: the mind studies the soil, wedges
out spudeyes and plants them, attends, devours with its body,
and yet declares itself independent of the soil: like a
Portuguese man-of-war, the mind shakes rustling tentacles
1535down into the nutriment: it wants to survive: as storms
of zooplankton pour up onto the shelf at dusk, it swarms
129
to feed: (I want to be declared a natural disaster area:
I want my ruins sanctioned into the artifice of ruins: I
want to be the aspect above which every hope rises, a
1540freshening of courage to millions: I want to be, not shaved
marble in a prominence that cringes aspiration, but the
junkyard where my awkwardnesses may show: my incompletions
and remains tenable with space: I want to be the shambles,
the dump, the hills of gook the bulldozer shoves, so gulls
1545in carrion-gatherings can fan my smouldering, so in the
laciest flake of rust I can witness my consequence and times:
I want to be named the area where charlatan rationality comes
to warp, where the smooth finishes bubble and perk, where
130
aerosol deodorants lose their breath: when the freeze of
1550this century retreats, leave me the slow boulders and
smashed pebbles arbitrarily disposed: whatever was bright,
clever, chic, harmonious in my time took plane from mind’s
tricky shallows and too quickly found plastic rightness
distant from the winding center: declare me an area
1555prohibited where the wind can come among the grasses and
weeds, robins nest in high wheels under the whole look of
heaven:) chaos, pushed far, gives up chunky sleaziness and
in the milling mastication of change assumes pale light
in a diffusion and on the periphery gives off golden
1560illuminations of unity and, beyond, becomes the merciful,
131
non-instrumental continuum: the continuum allows at the
outermost thinnings skimpy weavings tearing into the surrounding
uterus of nothingness, a way to go: from this womb
separations appear, the land from water, the sky departs
1565upward, the water breaks up into seas, lakes, rivers, runlets,
a few noticeable configurations, short of perplexing multeity:
the mind rides the cycle from all things enchanted and
summoned into unity, a massive, shining presence, to all
things diffused, an illimitable, shining absence, confusion
1570the wrong zone of intermediacy, a lack of clarifying extremes:
the week of windy cold comes and removes the last hangers-on
from the trees and heaps them against hedge, fence: rake
132
the leaves or a still morning’s inch of snow will weight
every disposition disposed, the pheasant moving about dazzled
1575with the sudden loss of ground: I am like the earth about
twenty-three degrees off, which gives me summer and winter
moods, sheds hopes and sprouts them again: what are my hopes:
it’s hard to tell what an abstract poet wants: my hopes
are for a context in which the rosy can keep its edges out of
1580frost: my hopes are for a broad sanction that gives range
to life, for the shining image of nothingness within which
schools of images can swim contained and askelter: my hopes
are that the knots of misery, depression, and disease can
unwind into abundant resurgences: forces other than light
133
1585give shadow: the leaves under the maple tree are flattened
in an overlapping elliptical, headed southward, the sun
itself subsided southward: after a long northwind, the leaves
are the wind’s shadow: a solid shadow with no shadowing
leaves on the tree, just northwa
rd splinters of nakedness:
1590a shadow of former substance transmigrated into shadow-substance,
not shadow but a redisposition of substance: the redisposition’s
form is the shadow of all the redisposing forces, a shadow
of the universe! a record and perfect summary, signs of
gusts in scatterings-out at the shadow tip: I wonder if one
1595can pay too much attention, as one can pray too much and
forget to shop for dinner: legible, the evidences propose
134
no text: dwelling over ashes, the bitter, spent spirit recovers
the taste of desertion, the sense of scripture: meanwhile,
in calm, a thousand shows wind to manifestation and a thousand
1600others loosen ropes and take down their poles: how much
attention can we pay, count the snowflakes or flurries, the
clouds or blue intervals: is celebration to pay no attention
but go along with the ongoing, buoyed up by accuracies
beyond receipt: if geese can see low, the leaf shadow will
1605show them which way to go: light patches on the floating
hill across the lake stand up into columns when half a
snow-flurry, giving medium, brushes through: interpenetrations
of gray and blue with breaking luminescences, streamings