by A. R. Ammons
15spindled up
break into light
and broken
snow
against a surf of motions: (occurrence
20continuous) and in
continuum.
1966 (1975)
Fix
Stumped again, I
sit and radiate
loss like
the message finally
5come:
in truth, though, I
don’t know what
to do: if
there were any
10way out of this,
I’d, giving up
the sphere,
assume the linear,
smart as a bullet.
1971 (1977)
Weather
Guilt’s been circling
my head all morning
waiting for the crime
to be defined
5so conscience can drop
and punish the black meat out:
but all morning I haven’t been able
to conjure up a single
wrong: the vulture rides
10in the fairest weather:
light and warmth
send him higher, abler.
(1975)
Coward
Bravery runs in my family.
Crying Out
Cool peripheries, raw
interludes of hedgerows,
confusions of ditchbanks,
brush weedstalks
5standing: testing the mesh
for a rupture, I
trouble the rims
and distances of possibility
because
10my center is vacant,
its hallelujah in a shambles.
(1973)
Certainty
I have certainly felt the documentation of terror:
I have certainly known my
insides to turn all hands
and rush to the surface for help
5and felt the hands go loose:
I certainly have come to believe in death:
my head rustles with footnotes and
quotation marks
that pinpoint places where my blood
10has certainly stopped cold and certainly raced.
1968 (1972)
The Flaw
I never saw anything like it—
such a day:
coolish, dry, bright,
the sky deep blue,
5trees and bushes a hard
dark green:
now
an hour before sundown
were it not
10for the robin’s song
rippling out along the pear limb
everything would be glass.
1967 (1968)
Triplet
Iris leaves
threes-in-one
cut
broadside into sun and rain
5to send high
flop loose the
hairy huzzy
iris bloom
Design
It’s actually six-thirty:
we’ve already been to
Scotch Hall for dinner:
I had tired flounder,
5the whitest meat, in
every flake
extremest finery of black
lace, once bloodways:
now of course the
10flounder has
completely foundered.
1968
Rocking
The cock sparrow with a sweet
tweetering
did it on-and-off
fluttering four times quick
5on the porch eaves:
the hen sparrow seemed
moved no further than
injunction’s
“propagate the species”:
10well, the sun’s breaking
out, maybe she’ll like that,
or maybe she means her
propriety to send
that earnest little
15rooster off again.
1968
Ars Poetica
The gods (for
whom I work) are
refreshing realists:
they let you into
5paradise (which is
the best pay—
and pay they
know’s the best
equalizer,
10disobliging
all concerned)
and say, sing:
that’s all: they
have their own
15business: and
you can’t begin
by saying, I’ve
been in
Hudson, Partisan,
20and Poetry: the
gods are
jealous of their
own judgment: and
you can’t say, I
25feel sort of
stove-up today, just
got rejected
by Epoch: the
gods, as with other
30species, don’t give
a damn about
you, only the song,
and song is all
protects you there:
35tough: but the
pay is good enough.
1959 (1974)
Course Discourse
Brief histories, scribblings,
are permitted to snow:
in winter woods, the
trees generous with open ground,
5the parchment gets
through and, settling, sheets
the leaves:
and there’s the legibility,
clumps of rabbit tracks
10tracing through the trees,
the leap off a mound
onto the frozen, snow-hidden
puddle, the broad skid,
the skirmish of recovery
15and the clumps again.
(1975)
Obtrusion
The leaf has to be thick
enough to catch the light
and thin enough
to let it through:
5the double governance, bind,
leads to precise adjustments,
optimum advantages within
constraining and releasing
possibilities: reason,
10caught between holding to
know and letting go,
adjusts to the exact taint,
introducing into the medium
just so much of itself as
15will construe but not destroy
the essence it seeks:
limit against limit
plays accuracy into procedure.
1974
Louise
I drove down to Aurora
at 4:15 and picked up
Louise from work
and Louise’s hair, what a deposit,
5and her eyelashes and teeth,
her shoulders hung
with all that seemed to be
getting away with her sweater,
and I suggested McDonald’s
10for dinner but thought we
should stop off somewhere
first and get it over with:
Louise and I love relaxed
dinners and that’s the
15kind we had: Louise’s
shiny fingers pulled
french fries out and her
stomach and hips and thighs
appreciated the hamburger: by
20then I was feeling real loose
and easy and thought as we
left of Louise’s ankles and
toes getting her out of the
place and of the way her
25mind put it all together
without even thinking.
(1973)
80-Proof
A fifth of me’s me:
the rest’s chaser:
35 lbs.’s
my true self: but
5chuck 10 lbs. or so for bones,
what’s left’s
stea
ks & chops &
chicken fat,
two-over-easy & cream-on-the-side:
10strip off a sheath of hide,
strip out nerves & veins
& permeable membranes,
what’s left’s a greasy spot:
the question’s
15whether
to retain
the shallow stain
or go 100% spiritual
and fifth by fifth
20achieve a whole,
highly transcendental.
(1964)
Having to Do with Birth
I’ve always been impressed with the word incunabulum:
even put a little off: cun immediately seems to be working
up to something—a kind of dash of feeling: and then
in cun suggests an actually ruffling stress or imminence
5hard to turn back on: nab, however, seems practically
imperative, following so close upon, as if ready will
were enduring the nudges of insistent, jabbing impulse: but
then nab u personifies the thing out of figurative reason,
activating recall of a clutter of ideal images, set in
10glow: bul is only an l short of the ideal presence of my
own hope in the piece: but I don’t know that I like to be
stirred where I’d counted on the safety of lexical drought:
a p would complete lum to the afterwards feeling all
too puzzlingly well; the lassitude and disorientation
15that while blessing the magic are half-relieved it’s gone.
1971 (1977)
Limp Lump
Glubgullies in the fricassee:
careful: circling things are
out: terminals, too, scare me & I’m
alarmed at the coils beginnings imply:
5let’s shove one
another:
impotence comes when need
exceeds seed: much is needed here:
one feels overworked working over
10the same old worked over work.
Mind
After the complex reductions come
the simple reductions, the apple
firm in the hand, weightless in the mind,
the elms drifted out of their roots, strung
5into a green-wind wear, a sense of
seeing through never ending
in the endings, a piling into the sun
of the mind’s sun returned: and then,
high with reductions, the chill that
10we live where we can’t live but
live there if we live, a house of mind
we never quite get the door open to.
1970 (1973)
Attenuations
Fantasies that do test the periphery of consciousness
let us have then, if death’s the solid center absolute
but death’s not, the center as much in the rufflings
of nothingness as the peripheries: for example, rock,
5whole ragged ranges, that fells us with surficial weight,
weighs at the center of the earth nothing, becomes
outward flotation cast into poise by its opposite
radial: whichever way we move from the exact, we become
less like the local but more like the sphere: this
10morning I turned a disintegrating ray on myself and
glimmered into mist, broke down further into limelight
and then became nothingness, continuum transportable.
1971 (1973)
Turning
From reality’s flowing flurry
take out a glass bead
and steer round &
round
5it, an everlasting:
the center’s in there,
its invisibility seen through.
(1973)
Swipe
In the useless study of uselessness one
gets cramps, twinges of contradiction—
how spiritless, in a sense, that contradiction
leads to wholeness, perhaps wholesomeness,
5in that if anything can be presumed to have
been divided, contradiction can seem to be
taking both quotients into account: how
quickly uselessness makes a useful comment
on usefulness; for example, that mere usefulness
10is useless, the useless less available
to the hacking divisions of definition,
a positive value: everything pays off a little.
Paradise
Rot richness, sticky, feverish,
that clears and thins, worm-gum globs
rinsing in rain,
the ripe garbage truck, odors
5lacing the wind,
dispersing, molecule standing miles downwind
from molecule,
naked, odorless—the translation:
the mind has seen a clear place
10beyond the reach of any molecule.
1965
Satisfaction
Still I’m for upper
buzzardry: the high
easy fix
of the actual meal:
5hunger lofts:
descent’s a nasty dinner.
The Unmirroring Peak
What changes:
the changeable which
everything, including
the universe swelling
5and shrinking from
bang to
bang, is: but
a summit in the
mind
10holds expansion &
contraction to its
lesser heights,
changelessly out-and-in even there:
but in
15the highest heights
where the converging loft
reaches past
material’s finest
wash to immaterial
20staying,
a land, the mind’s,
where nothing comes
to pass,
lies, abides, untouchable
25and unyielding:
down the slopes
changeable forms and colors
assume their fictions,
dread, joy,
30despair but lie, press against
the rise whose angle
is invariant and whose
completion is final.
1971
Pray Without Ceasing
I hear the low falling from the
highlands of hog-pasture, a music
of spheres, a couple: whatever is
done is to be
5undone:
call me down from the
high places: I have achieved much
of the difficulty of my translation:
stock in trade
10gunstock
stockings
stocks & bonds & good
stock
put no stock in that
15a stock case
in stock
stock the soup
3, the mystical figure, comes through:
the alternating, suspended,
20opposing spheres undirected and
the directed unity, reconciler and
putter to sleep—
milt on
the levees of rationality:
25“O Aegypte,
Aegypte, of thy religious rites nought
will survive but tales
which thy children’s children
will not believe;
30nought
will survive but words graven upon
stones that tell of thy piety.”
(Trismegistus)
and in sleep, as in a natural sleep,
35prone, face turned as if into breath,
he had about him needments, bottles of
rare glass, bowls: we wrapped him
in reed mat, rose from decomposing,
generating waters, went up on
40the
plateau
and put him in
sand: hereafter has
not·changed since for him:
but his head’s
45magnificence and funny-stuff, those
epicycles of motion, rituals of
turning, dancing, the wind
has taken, nothing
changed into grass: all the way
50out of the rise and fall:
O Egypt I sometimes hear the
future of the universe
speaking in a moonwheel’s
turning of sand and light:
55we set out a withe of silver grass and
it remains: it
has interfered with the natural wind,
fractured the paralleleity of
moonbeams and disturbed
60lesser sandstorms: mimicry
so often far more succeeds:
you heal back from napalm: the
flame-scars pull chin to chest,
the fingers stick: the mercy
65of sand’s
scarless:
when the sand roars, a lion
rouses in the center, his eyes,
as if in a hollow, headless:
70recognition is
the fiercest imperative:
a pararox, couple achers: the
real estate of the imagination:
whatever is—
75terror, pity, grief, death,
rising—a child sits in explosion’s
clutter, homeless, his small
driftwood legs, his eyes inventing
an equal rage & dark, white smears
80of burn
the mask
his face must fit:
whatever is, brutality, the inner siege,