by A. R. Ammons
1850mind thereto attached, to float free: the orb floats, a bluegreen
wonder: so to touch the structures as to free them into rafts
that reveal the tide: many rafts to ride and the tides make a
place to go: let’s go and regard the structures, the six-starred
easter lily, the beans feeling up the stakes: we’re gliding: we
1855are gliding: ask the astronomer, if you don’t believe it: but
motion as a summary of time and space is gliding us: for a while,
we may ride such forces: then, we must get off: but now this
beats any amusement park by the shore: our Ferris wheel, what a
wheel: our roller coaster, what mathematics of stoop and climb: sew
1860my name on my cap: we’re clear: we’re ourselves: we’re sailing.
1972–1973
DIVERSIFICATIONS (1975)
for Richard Howard
Transcendence
Just because the transcendental,
having digested all change into
a staying, promises foreverness,
it’s still no place to go, nothing
5having survived there into life:
and here, this lost way, these
illusory hollyhocks and garages,
this is no place to settle: but
here is the grief, at least,
10constant, that things and loves
go, and here the love that
never comes except as permanence.
1973 (1974)
Insouciance
You notice
as
the flowering spike
of the
5forget-me-not
lengthens
with flowering it
leaves
behind a drab notation (namely
10seeds even
smaller
than the flowers)
which does not
say
15forget me not
because
it means to
be back
(1973)
Narrows
Constrictions, gross substantialities (the lifting
of form) figure definitions: narrows govern seas:
like there at Gibraltar, an enrichment,
landforms, Africa’s good-sized mountain easily as if
5seeing across the Straits, looking into Iberia, the
Mediterranean touching the Atlantic in a seeable
scape: that ruffling of surfaces, Atlantic weather
mixing with Mediterranean, the winds of each weather
buttressing, reconciling their systems: awareness frantic
10with things and differences, the forces of great matters
brought into concisions of resolution: the meeting
of differences, a sexual stir: (I liked it there: I
was amused and somewhat afraid:) strictures clarify:
the rock, coarsened with form, has an edge, at least,
15like relief: the mulling ocean, au contraire, seldom
shows an island, whale, or glacier, its mounts of
a watery likeness, however majestically they lift,
roll, suck under, and kill: get at the stone in the
duct, though, and you know why the bladder swells:
20bolus in the artery, quickly damaging: but the ocean’s
fine, in a way, with a life of its own apart from
inlets and outlets: knots, tangles, twists draw
attention, provide milieu, engrossing turn and contrariety,
give circulations focus, wield greatnesses unspecific:
25how can we leave the narrows firm, surveyable, and
prefer undifferentiations’ wider motions: how can we
give up control into being controlled: the suasions.
(1972)
Salt Flats
I need this broad place to work because I’m
not certain what design wants
to emerge: I have to have room to work in various
places
5with minor forms
reconciling multiplicity here and there
a little at a time
before unity, subsuming all lesser curves and devices,
can assume perimeter:
10the blue-air mountains
on the plain’s edge jingled with vanishment:
I set to work: here is this, I said, drawing from
a center certain yearnings into line:
and here is this, wavy: I ran several miles
15across the sand, roughed an area off, then
informed it deeply with glyph and figure:
when
a single wind arrived, set
down its many hands, whirled, and made me out.
Full
I retire from
the broad engagements,
leave the line
and go
5back into the woods
to openings of
hillslides and lakes:
l do not want
to be
10loud with emptiness
a hundred years
from now: the
simple event
suffices—complete—
15when fall
hawkweed spindling
lifts a single
adequate blossom.
1963 (1973)
Uppermost
The top
grain on the peak
weighs next
to nothing and,
5sustained
by a mountain,
has no burden,
but nearly
ready to float,
10exposed
to summit wind,
it endures
the rigors of having
no further
figure to complete
and a
blank sky
to guide its dreaming
1974 (1975)
Lightning
Once a roving man
tired of roving
took a place and
planted a tree
5which grew
year by year—
its
roots deepened, complicating,
its
10branches filled out
holding, figuring
space:
and the man,
mirrored, stood
15in the tree:
one day the causes of
his roving
found him and struck:
he turned to the tree:
20it held
and could not go:
tired of roving but
unable to stay,
where could
25he go:
he hangs from the tree.
1965 (1973)
The Marriage
The world is wound round
with theorems, a winding:
syntax in thickets meshing:
coalescences of ongoing
5darkening with thread of
thought, unraveling: tangles
of hypothesis weaving
semantic currents: spools
of possibility feeding
10spun cotton balls: caps
of a priori with zones of
steamy incipience: the mind’s
spider laying into the natural
motions binding filaments
15of sight, the orb sustaining
warps of motion under
heaving, forced declarations:
ah, this caught thing!
it can’t get loose from
20meanings and the mind
can’t pull free of it.
1974 (1974)
Self-Portraits
Though I have cut down, pulled up, and
plowed you under, don’t, weeds, spurn
my more usual love:
that others have hated you
5costs my love not a quality:
&
nbsp; because others have hated you
my imagination, at home with dirty
saints, gets sand in its eyes:
if this lessens neither your horror nor mine,
10if this lessens neither your hardiness nor mine,
still it adds my pip to the squeak:
the rejected turn strange
to get their song through: I’m familiar
with byways: I’ve worn
15paths out of several unlocated woods.
Double Exposure
Flounderlike, poetry
flattens white
against bottom mud
so farthest tremors can get
5full-ranged to the bone:
but on the side it flowers
invisible with blue mud-work
imitations, it
turns both eyes.
1968 (1973)
Currencies
I participate
with rain:
precipitate at twig-ends
and come
5down:
drop from the bellies of galls:
elbows of branches accumulate
trembling nodes
that
10flash fang-silver
into
snow-soaked ground:
I participate with
rain’s
15gathering and coming down:
hear me, gathered into runlets,
brooks, breaking over falls,
escaping with the silver of seeing.
1964 (1972)
Bonus
The hemlocks slumped
already as if bewailing
the branch-loading
shales of ice, the rain
5changes and a snow
sifty as fog
begins to fall, brightening
the ice’s bruise-glimmer
with white holdings:
10the hemlocks, muffled,
deepen to the grim
taking of a further beauty on.
1974 (1974)
Emerson
The stone longs for flight,
the flier for a bead, even
a grain, of connective stone:
which is to say, all
5flight, of imaginative hope or
fact, takes accuracy from stone:
without the bead the flier
released from
tension has no true
10to gauge his motions in:
assured and terrified by
its cold weight, the stone
can feather the thinnest
possibility of height:
15that you needed
to get up and I down
leaves us both still
sharing stone and flight.
1973 (1973)
Meeting the Opposition
The wind sidles up to
and brusquely in a swell flattens
lofting one side
of the spirea bush:
5but the leaves have
so many edges, angles
and varying curvatures that
the wind on the other side
seeps out in a
10gentle management.
1973 (1973)
Appearances
I could believe water
is not water
and stone not stone
but when
5water comes
down the brook
corresponding with
perfect
accuracy of adjustment
10to the brookbed,
spreading like a pane
over slate
or wrinkling into
muscles to skirt
15a tilt
or balking
into a deep loss of
direction
behind a tangled dam
20and when
I feel those
motions correspond
to my own, my
running quick and
25thin and stalling broody,
I think a real
brook and I in some
missing mirror meet.
(1973)
Measure
for Robert Morgan
I said there must be someway
to determine
what good
a stalk of grass is—what
5other measure but man?
In the hierarchy of use
to us
sea-oats are
inconsequential. But since
10they exist, they
exist in the measure of
themselves
and promote the measure.
1963 (1964)
Delight
The angels who in innocent if
not painless intelligence
fly around a lot (sometimes away)
flew down one day
5to the pastures of men
and said
“look, this one’s a stone
brunted
and there is one turning in himself
10like a burnt-over viper
and look, this one’s
broader in his eyes than the world”
and the angels grew surprised
with the quantity
15of contortion, misplacement, and mischance:
the stone cried
“if I am not to take myself
as I am, by
what means am I to be changed” and the viper
20said
“the fountains of myself are a vision
I will not behold” and others grown old in
pain
cried out “who am I”
25and the angels said “shall we give advice”
and said “should we
bring water
or bread or should we at least slay
selected ones”
30but knowing neither whether to accept
the pastures as they were nor, if not, any
means to change them
veered off again
in broad loops and sweeps through the skies
35and out of sight brushed
stars in their going by atwinkle.
(1973)
The Stemless Flower
A big majestic poem, consummation,
could be written on the gradations
of flow from the gross to the fine:
but who would read it: no matter:
5brevity’s self-justifying: take
the energy of flow in diamonds,
rocks, trees, brooks, cyclones, in
light, feeling, mind, spirit:
of course, it’s not just
10the energy of flow, it’s
constant energy operating in a
diminishing substance, so the sum
total of change in a diamond is
slight, but in a thought, how little
15matter and how much speed: somebody
could hit the physicochemical texts
and come up with a nice rise on this
subject, a massive compilation and
registration, a book of order for the
20disgruntled, misapplied times: and
motion would then sway all—as it does.
Imperialist
Everybody knows by now
that the weeds are mine
& knows I don’t feel
altogether sorry for them:
5but they I think
resent being owned or
written into roses.
(1975)
Poem
In a high wind the
leaves don’t
fall but fly
straight out of the
5tree like birds
1973
Imago
I refuse the breakage:
I hold on
to the insoluble knots
I’ve circled for years
5turning in contradictory
wildness, as
safe wi
th center as
jugs and stars: what
I can’t become keeps me
10to its image: what
can’t be reconciled is
home steady at work.
1968 (1972)
Light Orders
Sometimes maple leaves come all of an angle,
stacked planes, resembling glimmery schools
of fish caught in dazzling turns: of course
leaves are a kind of fish the wind swims
5its ocean through, and the glimmering—dislocated—
of a school might be no more than staid leaves
the ocean riffles like a wind: but a spider
out there on one leaf’s built a surface web
over a lake of space, top of the leaf, stiffened
10into a drought fold, sloop, and he’s filtering out
whatever motion brings—the kill intended
exact, unglancing into metaphor: I feel
coming the rise of nets and flow and
the possibility of a further sea-wind summation
15and many things have died since that was old.
1969
History
The brine-sea coupling
of the original
glutinous molecules
preserves itself all
5the way up into our
immediate breaths:
we are the past
alive in its