by A. R. Ammons
truest telling:
10while we carry it,
we’re the whole
reading out of consequence:
history is a blank.
(1973)
Self-Projection
The driest place in the yard’s
under the faucet:
where there is hose,
length will move
5the source away
from its own critical drought:
hesitate and
undo: unscrew
and turn the undisciplined faucet
10on: what more than the self
sometimes needs the self.
1968 (1972)
Outside-the-Household Hint
When picking
pears
off a hanging
pear-limb
5start picking at
your highest
reach
and then pick
down into
10the limb’s rise:
if you start
picking
from
the bottom the
15limb in
rising
will bear
the high pears beyond
you.
Metaphysic
Because I am
here I am
(nowhere)
else
1969
Tussock
From high
winds the gulls
lie low: as the self
crouches from the
5ragings of its
high mind:
hunkers down
into all that
silence can advise.
(1973)
The Make
How I wish great poems could be written about nothing
you know just sitting around a comet coming
leaves falling off a bush in a cliff
ducks flicking their tails, a driblet spray,
5the universe turning over or inside out
small prominences on the ocean wind-smoothed into waxen scallops
how I wish there could be the most exciting line ever going nowhere
or traveling making money spending it messing around
a warp in pure space just a warp unwarping
10a stone losing three molecules into a brook’s edge
or the point of a leaf trying to fall off by itself
how I wish that instead of poetic tensions there could be dreaming
shales of mind spilling off (with a little dust rising) into deep cones
a gathering and spinning out
15into threads some so fine the mind rescues them with imagination
little bits of lightning when the wind bends them through the light
how I wish there could be such poems
about nothing doing nothing
1973 (1975)
Juice
I’m stuck with the infinity thing
again this morning: a skinny
inexpressible syrup, finer than light,
everywhere present: the cobweb becoming
5visible with dust and the tumblelint
stalled in the corner seem worthy.
Terminations
Sometimes the celestial syrup slows
into vines
stumps, rock slopes,
it’s amazing in fact how
5slow it can get—diamond:
but then sometimes it flows
free in a flood
and high
so procedure drowns out
10perception
practically, a roof showing
here and there
or a branch
bobbing:
15as skinny
wind it recalls
and promises everything
but delivers nothing
except the song that
20skims the mountains
and makes no sense
(except all sense)
to us
slowed discrete
25out of following.
(1973)
Fundamental Constant
The clouds,
from what possible formations,
nudged and shaped
to what directions,
5came this
way
and the rain, hardly breaking
free from the
larger motions,
10occurred:
I look through the window now
to the hedge
leaf
unsettled by a drop
15that quivering to fall
blinks a prismatic
code
several kinds
of change sorting
20through eons have
failed to change or break.
(1973)
Making It
Entering the dark sounds
all right
if promising radical
loss of diversion
5and going down into
dwelling through the dark
that sounds okay a
deepening into profundity
but at the giving
10up into the dark of the dark
the loss of
the sight of sightlessness
a cry begins
to tear
15that tears till it tears free
1973 (1974)
Scope
Getting little
poems off (clusters
of them) hits
centers—if lesser centers—
5quicker and
set-wise like the rocks
of kaleidoscopes
makes infinite
combinations possible whereas
10the long job’s
demand for consistency
levels,
though the one center it
shoots for
15may be deeper
(if hit
or if not moved away into
disintegration
by the fulsome carriages)
Weight
He loved cloud covers,
went into woods
to hide from stars: he
wept under bridges,
5noticed weeds, counted
frog calls
till a stone in
his belly hardened
against infinity, the
10grievances of levitation.
1965 (1976)
Ballad
I want to know the unity in all things and the difference
between one thing and another
I said to the willow
and asked what it wanted to know: the willow said it
5wanted to know how to get rid of the wateroak
that was throwing it into shade every afternoon at 4 o’clock:
that is a real problem I said I suppose
and the willow, once started, went right on saying
I can’t take you for a friend because while you must
10be interested in willowness, which you could find nowhere
better than right here,
I’ll bet you’re just as interested in wateroakness
which you can find in a pure form right over there,
a pure form of evil and death to me:
15I know I said I want to be friends with you both but the
willow sloughed into a deep grief
and said
if you could just tie back some of those oak branches
until I can get a little closer to mastering that domain
20of space up there—see it? how empty it is
and how full of light:
why I said don’t I ask the wateroak if he would mind
withholding himself until you’re more nearly even: after
all I said you are both trees and you both need water and
25light and space to unfold into, surely the wateroak will
understand that commonness:
not so you could tell
it, said the willow:
that I said is cynical and uncooperative: what could
you give the wateroak in return for his withholding:
30what could I give him, said the willow, nothing
that he hasn’t already taken:
well, I said, but does he know about the unity in
all things, does he understand that all things have a
common source and end: if he could be made
35to see that rather deeply, don’t you think he might
give you a little way:
no said the willow he’d be afraid I would take all:
would you I said:
or would you, should the need come, give him a little way
40back:
I would said the willow but my need is greater than
his
and the trade would not be fair:
maybe not I said but let’s approach him with our powerful
45concept that all things are in all
and see if he will be moved
(1973)
Three Travelogues
I.
Off backwoods macadam
swinging back at a sharp angle
onto the sandy road
downwoods
5laurel in hung cloud clumps opening
the sprung anthers
ready to shoot loose
multitudinous into the air
floats of pollen
10gazes of yellow along the pinkribbed floral bowls:
a grouse hen
sanding
in sun at the road’s edge,
not stirring, enthralled,
15interruption
a disbelief,
the car’s motion safety enough
and on along the ribbed rubbling road
to the white small bridge
20at the turn’s downward curve:
got out to see,
saw on the stream’s bank
in full sun
the arching fern, its
25cinnamon
rod lifting high, set off,
tall and honest,
waterbeetles swimming upstream,
darting, “standing” in flow:
30on the other side
damselflies, blackwinged,
needle bodies
enameled, oriental green,
at the wingtips, strutted open,
35a white dot, star,
the wings closed upward,
drawn open downward four white stars,
the lacy pumping of
amazement and desire
II.
40Fell ashore in high seas,
the blackwet, weed-slickened canes of my raft
loosened by the surf approach:
rose between rocks and hit ground
beyond the sea’s way:
45held an armful of reeds from my breaking ship:
gleaned from swell and foam
slack straws to keep:
and went higher among sprayless rocks and stiff shrubs
and rested,
50the stars available, multitudinous, the dark
wide, deeper than sight:
I lived there, treasuring
the rainpool in the scalloped rock,
stretching my clothes to showers, gathering
55rain,
wringing the pool full,
drinking from the twisted fountain:
there I lived, preying
on gulls’ nests,
60splashing minnows from the runlets of caves,
sleeping,
the straws of my ship bedded under
stones from the wind’s lift, dreaming,
tomorrow wings,
65the cautious, off-circling eyes,
the water clear, dotless far as light
into the tunnels of rock,
fire’s simmering,
a white-sailed cloud’s blue hull of rain:
70nude, brush-burned, alone: underwater, land and
vegetation, hostile, oily luxuriance,
the deep, windless surges, quiet, proliferation:
sang on the moon-bleached highest rock
the bell-less hours of night,
75time-starved in the plenty of time
III.
An interruption makes a world: descent of
energies, failure of equilibrium: an unevenness,
imbalance:
in late March I went for a walk along the
80margin of fields and woods
(margins are places for things to happen:
a line of difference there, disparity,
discernible change)
and could hardly bear the sight of the small events
85happening in fullness, occurrences of promise or terror:
a green flake of weed between two larger flakes,
the dark wet ground clumpy, rising here or falling,
weed leaf curling to crowd into the sun,
that great body, furious and radiant, relating
90directly to billions of events
too common to notice or too small: wild
plum blooming under the edge of pines,
a hold of ground and grass
saved along the ditchbank from the spring plow,
95the extra green in a rye blade where a rabbit dropped
dark pellets (leaching out and lightening
to rain and sun): the placement
and width of brackets on a soggy stump:
these events:
100I can hardly tell about them: they seem so
worthless yet are undiminished: so independent,
throwing back our meanings:
and followed the ditch down the wood’s edge,
across the bottomland field, and
105into the woods at the other side
and on down through the woods to where
in the branch the small ditch-flow lost
its separate saying: found a dry, high log, held
from the ground by the circle of turf it turned
110in falling, and sat down
to see if I could take on the center of a filled out
world but heard from another fallen tree
a branch-trickle whose small music
from breakage and hindrance brought the world
115whole and full again and to itself.
1962 (1969)
Sight Unseen
Take some prose and build
fairly shabby metrical dikes
around it, so it seems
firm enough, if empty, like
5scaffolding (that was an
unintentional rhyme) and
(also unintentional) you have
a good representation of
the frame (pun unintended)
10of mind most of us prefer—
at least, adopt: (here
see visions of people
like tendrils forming into
trellises growing up into
15(unintentional) crane-like
triangulations, noble structures
that attain workable loft:)
nobody needs, apparently, or
apparently desires monstrous
20extrusions of energy,
maniacal spools, jungle growths
of ascendancy that could
crunch the held spaces and
finger, in wobbly failures,
25the sky (the sky of sky and
sky of mind): I am against
something but I don’t know
what: failure, a fatigue
of the metal (or bracket loose),
30enters into every means and
proposition, just as some little
success can be expected nearly
anywhere: I have no beef:
take a fairly unselfconscious
35prose style, in a prosy day,
and fail to get excited
about its median flaws and
flows and sort o
f relax
into an adequate object: the
40privileged moments confine
their privilege to moments
while we have to live, somehow,
all day: well, here we are, unlost,
advanced beyond being found:
45there in the mirror is
a half-engaged willingness
to comply, an interest
we can practically claim.
1973 (1978)
Facing
I take your hand:
I touch your
hair, as if
you were going away
5to be a long time
away, as
you must someday go
forever away:
lust burns out high
10into light: I walk
away and back: I
touch your hair.
1966
Glass Globe
I woke up (merely) and found
myself
inside a bulb of pain:
I said
5everybody else looks all right,
it must be mine:
I kept it & kept it
shined invisibly clear.
1968 (1972)
Separations
Looking for clear water he
came from murky lowlands
to the desert and
after high plains & higher mesas
5saw a white mountain
and going up into the sharp reaches
fell down and drank melt:
the cold water bore no
dream: he perished,
10swilling purity.
1965
Circling
Occurrence is continuous (and in
continuum)
(mind
ever making) and unmaking: the star
5burns to the brim:
water moves:
motion organizes, parallel motions
echo along
parallels
10and break out (or are broken out)
to oppose
other motions, confluences:
the white flakes of
rue anemone