by A. R. Ammons
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skirting whirls: the column stands but moves over the hill,
1610the foot walking up and down ravines, and sometimes leans
a broken top as if held up by the sun: time enough to think
of death when there’s no time left to think: big ditties:
the poem is love: love is fictional only where it can’t
grow, but always supreme: making the poem makes the body
1615that makes love: the abstract poem reaches too far for the
body, love bodiless there, better, if scarier, burns nearby:
or having loved nearby, the abstract poem turns to the spirit,
bodiless and frightless: or the abstract poem, searching
breadths and heights of fiery ease, trains its way down to
1620settle in the woman’s eye: we have so many ways to go wrong
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and so often go wrong, we must read rightness written in the
face of wrong: if the abstract poem goes out and never
comes back, weaves the highest plume of mind beyond us, it
tells by its dry distraction, distraction: love is better
1625awry than any other quantity true: the abstract poem, yearning
into the lean-away, acquires a skeleton to keep it here, and
its jangling dance shocks us to attend the moods of lips,
the liquid changes of the spiritual eye: the abstract poem
cleaves through the glassy heights like the hump of a great
1630beast, the rising reification, integration’s grandest, most
roving whale: in this way Enlil became a god and ruled
the sky: in this way earth became our mother: in this way
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angels shaped light: seek the whole measure that is ease
and ramble around without constriction or distortion
1635(debilitating exclusion) until the big sky opens the freedom
between design and designed airiness: the rational mind
absorbed, structures float in plenitude rather than in
starved definition: order, the primeval hillock, is a
lessening from chaos, chaos the ampler twin: the visible
1640resides within the invisible: the coherent within the
incoherent: the discontinuous, the discrete, occurs within
the continuous: the visible, coherent, discrete dwell
in flotation which faces out on the illimitable: the power,
he said, to invent and sustain great structure is uncommon,
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1645dibs and dabs, driblets and tail-ends defeating minds, those
incapable of the see-through intermingling: but there are
minds, he maintained, nervous of structures, especially the
impressive, minds requiring the see-through to act as liquid
of flotation outside the structures, such a flotation no
1650structure could hem in but many structures could sort out
their destinies fairly freely in: I don’t know about you,
but I’m sick of good poems, all those little rondures
splendidly brought off, painted gourds on a shelf: give me
the dumb, debilitated, nasty, and massive, if that’s the
1655alternative: touch the universe anywhere you touch it
everywhere: man’s a scourge not because he is man but because
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he’s not man enough: how public like a smog publicity is:
in spite of the spectacularity of the universe (even in the
visual reception) it appears to those who have gone above our
1660atmosphere that the universe is truly a great darkness, light
in the minority, unsurrendered coals sprinkled in the thinnest
scattering, though, of course, light, even when seen from
afar, attracts the attention most: but out on the periphery
the lights are traveling so fast away their light can’t get
1665back to us, darkness, in our dimension, finally victorious
in the separation: I have dreamed of a stroll-through, the
stars in a close-woven, showering bedazzlement, though
diamond- or ruby-cool, in which I contemplated the universe
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at length: apparently, now, such dreams, foolish anyway,
1670must be abandoned and the long, empty, freezing gulfs of
darkness must take their place: come to think of it, though,
I’m not unfamiliar with such gulfs, even from childhood, when
the younger brother sickened and then moved no more: and
ahead lies a gulf light even from slow stars can never penetrate,
1675a dimension so endless not even the universal scale suits it:
the wise advise, don’t get beyond yourself into foolish largeness,
when at my step is a largeness the universe lies within:
to be small and assembled! how comforting: but how perishable!
our life the tiny star and the rest, the rest: this extreme
1680flotation (it and us) this old, inconstant earth daily born
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new into thousands of newborn eyes—proceeding by a life’s
length here and there, an overlapping mesh of links proceeding:
but, for me, turning aside into rust, reality splintering the
seams, currents going glacial and glassy with knowledge, the
1685feared worst become the worst: meanwhile, once again the world
comes young, the mother follows her toddler around the cafeteria
and can’t see him her eyes so keeping in touch with the admiring
eyes of others: (the old mother, thin-white, thick-jawed, feels
her way, but barefooted, out to the mailbox: nothing: all
1690the fucking finished, all the sweet, terrifying children grown
up and blown away, just the geraniums in the tire watered
every day, fussed at, plucked:) let me tell you how I get up
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in the morning: I get up, take a step or two, and morning jars
and pauses me, and I look down into the bottom of my grave:
1695shaken, I move, though, as if through iron, on when my life,
my real life, wakes up in a tantrum and shakes me like last
year’s beanstakes: I lean against the doorjamb until my life
gags into despair, and then I proceed: I proceed, how, into
what: I say, if I can get through this hour, I won’t come to
1700another one but to life: with a front left, I erect a smile
on it, and right away everybody starts laying his troubles on me:
I say in myself, don’t lay any more trouble on me: when here
comes another youth anxious for fame and sorry he doesn’t
have it: what can I do, he says: well, I say, why not try
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1705whatever you can: by the time you amount to something,
the people you meant it to mean something to are dead and you
are left standing there, your honors in your hands: the
ribbons wilted: the cheese melted: the sausage running:
there at the end (which may be anywhere) after dullish
1710afternoons and vacant mornings, after settlement from the
disturbance of sex, when you were coward, clown, fool, and
sometimes lord, there saved for the end, a novelty, death,
infinite and nonrepeating, an experience to enter with
both eyes wide open, the long play that ends without boredom:
1715its unexpectedness such you don’t have the materials for
a rehearsal, more surprising than with girls where one
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approach run through can profit a later one: you go in,
your mouth stretches so wide it turns you inside out,
a shed skin, and you gu
lp nothingness, your biggest bite,
1720your greatest appetite, stuffed with vacancy: who knows
whether in the middle years, after the flashing passions
seem less like fountains and more like pools of spent flood
metal, one may not keep on partly because of that black sucker
at the end, mysterious and shiny: my skull, my own skull
1725(and yours) is to be enclosed—earpits, eye sockets, dangled-open
mouth—with soil, is to lie alone without comfort through
centuries and centuries, face (if any) up, as if anticipating
the return of the dream that will be only the arrival of
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the nova: how sluggish consciousness, when in death the
1730nova is a wink away! the rational, the formed, defined,
directional is the male principle: the cushioner, the female
principle, the pudding within which the rational plays:
these two principles give birth to mind: one could not want
all pudding (pudenda) nor all shape but an interworking,
1735a whole generating: this poem is an elongated cylinder
designed to probe feeling, recognition, and realization,
to plunder the whoozies of the world sensationally and cause
to come to bear what is and may be: I am not a whit manic
to roam the globe, search seas, fly southward and northward
1740with migrations of cap ice, encompass a hurricane with
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a single eye: things grown big, I dream of a clean-wood
shack, a sunny pine trunk, a pond, and an independent income:
if light warms a piney hill, it does nothing better at the
farthest sweep of known space: the large, too, is but a
1745bugaboo of show, mind the glittering remnant: things to do
while traveling: between entrance and exit our wheels
contact the ribbon of abstract concrete: speed-graded curves
destroy hills: we move and see but see mostly the swim of
motion: distance is an enduring time: here, inside, what
1750have we brought: between blastoff and landing, home and
office, between an event of some significance and another
event of some significance, how are we to entertain the time
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and space: can we make a home of motion: there is a field
of sheep, vanishing: something terminal may be arriving to
1755that house, but we are leaving: mortgage payments, water rent,
phone bills, medical insurance, steep steps imprisoning an old
man: but we are fueled and provisioned: motion is our place:
history lists and you know by the difficulty of getting around
at an angle all day that something is too much or amiss: your
1760awareness begins to take shape, to obtrude, to call attention to
itself, a warp or persisting tension: you are reminded
to go below and check the ballast: how is it that what was
enough for both sides has become too much for one side and not
enough for the other: you gather a force and go down to make
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1765correction: history uprights, sways to the give and take in
a touchy balance, so active, lively, so responsive: nevertheless,
a wind may come up subtle or sudden and persist and you may
have to go down and change the ballast, only to find when the
wind does cease that uprightness in an imbalance is imbalance:
1770fire, instructive flame, foliate saprophyte, consumer,
criticism at the wafered edges of form, master of shape, god
of a kind, traveling wave of the imagination, fire line,
waster of the old that gives destruction’s ash to the future,
we are assembled, what is the instruction: the instruction is
1775in perceiving the principle itself, the god, his action: by
this instruction we are reduced, our works ashes in the wind,
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but the field, gone through, is open and in the woodburn
the jackpine cone flicks open and ejects seed: ferns rouse
subsoil curls: birds accept the brush margins of feeding
1780grounds and hawks police the new actions for waywardness:
the gods of care and economy of motion, the grass gods, the
god of the killdeer arrive, and the old god of the forest
begins to take everything away again: from other planets,
as with other planets from here, we rise and set, our presence,
1785reduced to light, noticeable in the dark when the sun is
away: reduced and distanced into light, our brotherhood
constituted into shining, our landforms, seas, colors
subsumed to bright announcement: we are alone in a sea that
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shows itself nowhere in a falling surf but if it does not
1790go on forever folds back into a further motion of itself:
the plenitude of nothingness! planets seeds in a coronal
weaving so scant the fabric is the cloth of nakedness:
Pluto our very distant friend skims a gulf so fine and far
millions and thousands of millions of years mean little to—
1795how far lost we are, if saving is anywhere else: but light,
from any distance or point we’ve met it, shines with a similar
summation, margin affirmational, so we can see edges to the
black roils in the central radiances, galaxies colliding in
million-year meetings, others sprung loose into spiral
1800unwindings: fire, cold space, black concentration:
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harmonies (in my magnum hokum) I would speak of, though
chiefly as calling attention to neglected aspects of fairly
common, at least overreaching, experience: with considerable
rasping along the edges, bulgings of boundaries, we made
1805and tamed into play each of these States: if the States
kept falling into lesser clusters about lesser points of
focus (and then the long division, so costly), still we
checked and balanced and, incorporating as much sin as grace
with each holding, kept the mobile afloat, together, each
1810dangle with good range to dip and rise and convey itself
roundly with windy happenstance, communicating, though, its
position throughout the network and receiving from the sums
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of the network just adjustments: yes, we got it all together,
ocean to ocean, high temperate to low temperate, and took
1815in so much multiplicity that what we hold person to person
in common exists only in the high levels of constitution or
out to the neighbor’s fence, an extreme, an extreme pity,
with little consolidation in the middle after all: still,
it holds and moves within the established rigors: now, with
1820the same rasping and groaning, we try to put the nations and
communities of nations together and there, too, only by
joining tenuous extremes, asserting the dignity of the single
person above united nations: we pray this may succeed and
correct much evil in the dark edges of dislocation and
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1825distraction: lately, we’ve left out the high ranges of music,
the planetary, from our response, though the one sun is here
as usual and the planets continue to obey holy roads: the
galaxy is here, nearly too much to speak of, sagely and
tremendously observing its rotation: we do have something to
1830tune in with and move toward: not homogeneous pudding but
united differences, surface differences expressing the common,
underlying hope and fate of each person and people, a gathering
into one place of multiple dissimilarity, each culture to its
own cloth and style and tongue and gait, each culture, like
1835the earth itself with commonlode center and variable surface,
designed-out to the exact limit of ramification, to discrete
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expression into the visible, specific congruence of form and
matter, energy moving into the clarification of each face, hand,
ear, mouth, eye, billions: still with the sense of the continuous
1840running through and staying all the discretions, differences
diminished into the common tide of feelings, so that difference
cannot harden into aggression or hate fail to move with the
ongoing, the differences not submerged but resting clear at
the surface, as the surface, and not rising above the surface
1845so as to become more visible and edgy than the continuum:
a united, capable poem, a united, capable mind, a united capable
nation, and a united nations! capable, flexible, yielding,
accommodating, seeking the good of all in the good of each:
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to float the orb or suggest the orb is floating: and, with the