The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1

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,