The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1

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