The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1

by A. R. Ammons

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  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,

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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,

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  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:

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  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

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  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:

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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,

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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