by A. R. Ammons
475roots and moles (and grubs) (and
a microorganism that feeds on
carbon monoxide) live in the ground: fish and
ribbonswale and —worms live in the sea:
birds carrying stable mite colonies
480and crop-worms live in the air: we, we,
carrying fungal and bacterial residences, our
numberless silent populations, flashy molds,
angry, flashy molds, live, though mainly
in the light, a fine fluid
485fragmentation breaks into presence: (any
high consistency, of course,
lacks the differences to know
itself by—hence is unheard, invisible,
unknown, etc) so we are here in a very
490great blackness except when the fluid
surfs against a pumpkin, thinning willow,
boulder (any whole thing in space such as
earth) and the disturbance communicates
itself dispersing through molecular
495air, a frizzling wide static of sight,
and then the eye’s central blackness
none can read or follow creates a
disturbance of color to pick up light
disturbances: O
500fine fluid, fluency,
and then the
finest highest fluids we’ve
learned to live in on occasion or for short
visits, the sheeting pulses of the spiritual
505intelligence which
when it breaks
against & thru us
declares its nature:
if you would shed light upon a thing
510smash it: or adore it, leave it whole,
hold to it in darkness:
who will remember us
we cry
yet we will forget
515before we are forgotten
if you would explain That Which Is by
structure you would have to locate
the spurs and main beams, sills, joists,
of the put-together, whereas anything
520worth taking apart is so put together
it is assimilated
beyond edge, angle, or joint:
niche, cranny, or nookie:
you can erect skeletons of
525structure for their own sake and then
analogize freely: hermeneutic
propaedeutic:
good thing June peas
come loose from the continuum:
530make a moongate of an
oeil-de-boeuf, make the frangible-invisible
infrangible:
the mind buries to let lie:
times, stations, planes
535and overlappings of felt-events give
base and height, structure, to feeling:
vindictiveness, jealousy, greed, alarm,
hostility adjust to deep
dispositions so that reconciliations
540and motions at a greater height can be
released as tenderness, concern, delight:
the error not that the deep
feelings, found, are heaved up
but that
545heaving as a form destroys the
forms of modesty, gentility, and
modulated delight:
at three I realized
that my interpersonal relationships
550considered for example as a cottonball
of interweavings and
closenesses (a warmth, as of a
mother-centered, father-peripheried
group) were going to be sheared off,
555cut through
and that I was going to be a bit of
lint blowing in the irrelevancies of
dissociation: as I grew older
I learned this
560more thoroughly:
I write for those who have
no comfort now and will never have any:
I’m delighted that the comfortless are
a minority and
565that rosy tales amble otherwise for others:
I’m not making a fuss:
I note the determination:
it is a strict script
written in the injustice of
570necessity: I forgive
the injustice, nearly: I no longer cry
to be another, not myself, or seldom:
you who have no comfort
are welcome here, here
575with the chaff
alongside the abundant reaping, among
the weeds, after the gleaners:
I am the writing of what was to be but
did not become: your writing
580strangled mine:
I make seeing because I have nothing else
& nothing to do in the seen:
bitterness
compels me
585to roll my
tongue and spit
a saying
to the loneliness of my unbecoming
unbecoming:
590I bring youno harm that
no harm butis not nothing
I bring you
nothing
this is “lake country” too: I hadn’t thought
595of that: indeed, “finger lake country”: see
you top that one (has a small extra finger or
so): course I’m country and western: I like
music that plinks and means it: western New
York: the poetry isn’t as good either
The Hieroglyphic Gathered, the Books
600The hieroglyphic gathered, the books
numbered and shelved each
to its interior singing, the hum
broken in on or left in high loft
unattended, the quill-conversions to
605mock permanence, so many acts
feared, committed or hoped, regretted—
what a relief to go outside away from
the rooms, seminars, policy-committees
to where stability’s mode is movement, wind
610working with leaves and trash
across the asphalt, windings and
scatterings, starlings flying
into the ivyvine-skein leafless
against the Music building and picking
615berries, the clouds fluffy,
pulling apart here and there into blue
sliver-troughs: the freshness
of breaking down, picking,
churning through
620versus the artifice
ungathered after all anywhere
except into the fluidities of currency
forever: (that happened yesterday
and only gathered hieroglyphics can
625keep it):
distinguish the long
arm of the law from
the member in good standing:
it’s pouring rain but I went walking:
630the first rain on Dr. Ensworth’s dog’s
grave, now mounded among the hedge shrubs:
whiff of earthworm
(I almost said earthroom), puddles
fragrant and in the puddles ornaments,
635stars of green weed bottom-clear:
from every needletip of spruce
bough, bough on bough, spruce on spruce,
hung a drop-bulb, gray lit:
will equanil and elavil replace the
640trances and spells of religion, philosophy,
art, and madness, theories of depth
psychology or depth theories of the deep:
for, altogether, miltown can do more than
Milton can: luncheon muncheon: more
645than fluff and(l)anguish
less than effluvium: milk is white
blood:
clouds giving way, the sun broke
out and turned up the voltage
650in the bulbs: my fingers are so
cold from the walk (another one) I can
&n
bsp; hardly type: chez fuck’n’suck: also no
book like a frigit: and no poem
with a bush you could fly your bird in:
655forecast for today
were snows and blizzards
but we may
have a mere
high, empty with glory:
660would a collection
of clarities
be clearer than a clarity
or as the collection
grew would the
665single clarities remain
clear and
a great darkness commence
to surround
or would opposite lobes of clarity
670annihilate themselves
into continuum emptiness:
FINGER LAKES PAINTING
I don’t like any bush
water won’t drip off
675except the
two-legged bush, of course, how happy, and
the golden bramble-bush in whose
branches the Sumerian goat’s horns, vexed,
tangle:
680desert crows,
picky, and the deep desert hawks and
flight-lean eagles, but
walking predators, too, cautious,
big-eyed, and “possessed of a gnawing
685hunger to destroy and ingest” as we
artists, so to speak, would create &
dump, only the hunger remaining likewise
stuck in the bush
and mama goat gone and papa off:
690leaves fall from the thornbush,
hair and meat from the
goat: skeleton, branch,
the slackened-free entanglement:
the goat thrashes and bleats at midnight
695and overhead the desert stars,
big brights (not helping)
and oil underground, the
goat chafing with sharp hooves to
peel and worry down the bush:
700the good of images is
that they make no
statement and the bad
is that they make (evoke)
numberless statements:
705(or is that good, too:
meanwhile, the statement
makes one statement: except
in the clump, thicket,
or cluster of statements
710is the image again)
I could write forever, I mean, I could:
I never would
because boundaries, terminations,
determinations give class to held and holding:
715but the imagistes should have
known that the Golden Calf
narrows, confines, straitens,
identifies, and lessens the Spirit
too much which is shape without
720shape, timeless time,
visible and never to be seen:
poems should imitate the spirit’s motions from
the fabulous limitation, so
golden because so
725striking off temptation, of
the means, uh:
I can speak big and high
(but to which end?)
I can hone the severe metric,
730incision’s incendiary:
but honing misses broadcast:
anyway, who would have one around
speaking big and high:
over dishes: filling the vaporizer:
735emptying the trash:
prefer chitchat to
swales of the austere unknown:
neighbor down the street stakes
his dog out on the lawn, chain
740twenty feet, pretty
good run: I notice a path of peripheral
lawnwear, a ring of loss
where the chain, run out, runs
round: the central self unattended,
745unworn while the untouchable
other, far and away calls forth
the bark, the slaver, slobber,
scenting: to pull up stakes!
I can talk big: I come
750from a land of bigtalkers and
big talkers: what one needs is
the address of relief (relief of
address): (King Kong is on—
Thanksgiving classic): summer
755for dogs is a conflagration of
smells while winter is the ashes
(snow), a sprig of smoke
rising here and there:
all this poetry
760in Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving
Your Full-Service Mover, Madam
Your full-service mover, madam:
your full-service madam, mover:
arouse, attract, specify,
identify, concentrate, propel
765and release unmixed, mixed
emotions: I can package
reactions, lob, locate, and lure
centers, keys, knobs,
slots and play upon you as with
770or upon an organ:
go off to a
country, you see things done
different ways: you distinguish fashion
from nature, an educational
775distance: but, educated, you’re
into fashion more than nature,
a change loosening, shallowing:
overcast forecast a
true cast but this afternoon is
780to open sunny periods, dashed
dashes, clearing exclamation
points, followed by
colonic etceteras:
we need a basis for argument,
785argument always we have enough of,
although probably never more
than we need, but though we have
experienced tugging
this way and that
790and though we have chipped, honed,
polished, dug and double-dug,
we have failed to find
the single, the first, not to mention
mountain or continent, grain (tiny mew) of
795unyielding reality:
what a pity, many will sigh,
having argued at length over nothing:
but many will be grateful,
locating the necessary recalcitrance
800in the unyieldingness to explanation, that
is, finding centers of operations
where, as with juggling, nothing is,
and in contrary motions finding
balance’s informed harmony:
805explanation explains nothing away: get
up the next morning and recalcitrance
has shaded up to opacity again:
think of the medium, the medium’s
malleability, explanation works in,
810wordy nothingness: then how reassured
we are to risk castles only air and how
delighted to know
that explanation changes just itself,
an arrived-at nothing: whereas,
815the work of art (here come the boss)
establishes an empty-centered space,
spiral stabile, wordless where words
may not go,
a recalcitrance of a kind explanation
820can only sharpen itself against:
lukewarm stand to reason
the elm I write of is
not the doomed elm, the dutch,
but the siberian,
825small-leaved, resistant: the two doomed elms
I had were cut down
and hauled away: just now,
a snowbead shower: the beads fall,
springing, on the greenroofed garage
830and roll off the eaves some
but when fall pauses
melt scrubs the white away
(somedays a mist
too fine
835to form drops
at the eaves
or shine the highway)
darkens things a
little, though
When in
Early
840When in early
December everything should be
naked
except spruce, cedar, yew,
here and
845there down the side
of a hill or in
a hill’s hollow
will be found
a willow’s fragile clothes,
850yellow dress dropped,
showing the green slip’s
shift
of hidingsnow rhymes
soundwise but
855 contrariwise
(being alike incolorwise
one set ofwith crow
terms and
unlike in the other
860make oh, my father, you
one whole formsaid, “someday
overmastering your mouth will
the one polarget you in trouble”
unlikeness)you were (I’ve
865 made you)
right
the sheet ofand you said,
snow, thin,“you’ll be a preacher,
missing,like your uncle,”
870mingled with loft,close enough, in that
under cedars andI try to give the
such word life:
under the mailbox oh, my father,
a wind-mingled I am one of the few
875thinning left to miss you
I do not miss you much
mostly representing the reachable or
available sky
like sky like ground
880except for interruptions:
snow’s itself’s scripture
but in addition
written in it
accumulate actions
885reading re-enacts—
the pigeon-toed pheasant,
a hen, I think, walked across the driveway,
short toe inward, long toe, you know,
one foot almost in front of
890the other—a mystery and
contemplation, the beautiful, plain hen
color-coded, her signs
our door mouse
houses between the concrete
895step and a bottom shingle: every now and
then I catch him streaking for
concrete crack or door crack: yesterday
morning, there was an inch of snow,
(remember)
900just enough the mouse could nuzzle under:
he inscribed eventuality on the lawn,
a limber line of snow-collapse showing
behind him: and today, little snow left,
there is the dribble of his feet
905over the white blacktop: if it doesn’t
warm up more
the paperboy will see
his yesterday-afternoon, snow-pressed,
delivery bike trail
910after snow
when evening clears and
night settles
cleared and cold,
crisp forms
915on the snow