The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 1
Page 71
4190Well-Tempered Clavier and
my feelings lighten,
the melody so incredible,
the counter-melody incredible,
the workings in and out
4195precise and necessary
Like Fifty
Like fifty
I’m fifty
ditch water,
spring caterpillar,
4200ripples downhill,
an eager
thermometer,
the volume of motion a direct
reading of melt
4205and melt keyed to the temperature
so during the time of thaw
correction made for
shrinkage of reservoir,
the ditch
4210with some variable constant
lag tells:
I don’t care much about the
language these days (!)—turn this upside
down and you have
4215I wantthe happiness
to make a point:without measure
the point is essential,
the connection: the language
should be adequate:
4220(I’ve felt, might as well admit
it, other ways (not
necessarily opposite (
sometimes opposite) ways)
before)
4225if mush were slushdud
meep could sleepdad
scruffy lines between me & my
neighbors, lean thickets,
spirea brown fine-bush and
4230overhangings of maple, silver
and sugar, big spruce,
honeysuckle bush-stump, ground
cover, and my own kept ant
hills: a stringy wilderness
4235inhabiting civilization’s
straight lines
a half-century inscribed
birthday cake, promises
of presents, a wheelbarrow
4240(red, rained on) and stereo!
A 41 Morning, Still Cloudy
A 41 morning, still cloudy,
rainy, gray, vague, the only
snow left
skinny archipelagoes, once
4245drifts, or stalls, as by (before)
(or after) garages or thickets:
the forecast is for
skin temperatures dropping
through the day
4250into snow flurries
with no significant
accumulation:
still three months away to leaves:
for us now there
4255is a discontinuity in the
flow of energy from the
physical which we still can
trust some to the metaphysical
now exploded: ideally, the
4260physical would be the roots
or trunk and the metaphysical
would arise easily and smoothly into
the subtleties of embranchment
allowing, when leaved, flows
4265and wavings of light, variable
shades, tones and atmospheres
like the spiritual temper of a time:
for us now, we dig in to
see if the trouble with the
4270boughs is not some trouble
with the roots and so we have
nearly killed the tree:
still, however long it is to
leaves, the grass has from
4275this warm spell taken
the hint, sprung its leaves
up into the cushions of air
and given out a tint hint:
imagine, the readiness
4280of it all! the unwearying readiness
to cycle, eagerness all over
fresh, as if for the first time:
now the tree is cracked off
at the ground: a peel of
4285cambium holds the boughs:
the boulder columns
of the temple
hold
up (arbor-skinny
4290roof)
eternal emptiness
I brought in the garbage
cans, there was
(at this temperature)
4295a faint smell in them:
it was
nearly pleasant:
spring’s first
midwinter
4300fragrance:
we eat the dead, swirling decay into
such a fret it gives energy off
to us, saprohumanists:
we can’t go on long eating and shitting and
4305beshitting the world before,
eaten, we are beshat:
the banqueter’s the banquet:
(well, then, dine!)
look you to it:
4310will not the wolfer be wolfed:
can there be a dwelling for man
with no cock to cry the days
in: I hear from across the lake
in quiet spells
4315dogs barking or crows cawing: or,
even, though terribly early,
geese going over, high over:
in any case, it is not the
rooster, wing-thubbing and crowing:
4320do you not miss the biddies:
yellow butterballs
peeping about the hen’s legs
and beak:
do you dwell securely where
4325there is no cackle to the lay
and no offal dog neither
nothing
good Lord not even a guinea:
I need pig and fowl: company:
4330and the goat!
how I need a goat!
what is the flavor
of anything without
the bright-eyed,
4335astonished,
big-balled billy: or the
fucking sheep: who can do
without it: what we have is
the radio blaring
4340a flat high level
of disaster this
and disaster that:
when I lived in the world
there was nothing worth doing
4345doing
Produce and Fuctifry
Produce and fuctifry
a snow so misty, melty,
and thick
only careful looking sees it:
4350it does not resemble itself
on garage or grayass: my
teeth and victory stick
dream of being
hard on
4355cavities
guys with things so fine
they consider noses
or so blunt(earful,
they blunder earsgetting an)
4360stuprumstreamnew snow
stupulose millrunon old
washmelt narrows
brookbrooks
creek
4365branch
millrace
mill
milltown
miltown
4370Milton
Milton
geese did fly over yesterday!
northward along the east shore
harkking & honnking
4375in the accustomed ways:
seeing believes even if belief
can sustain seeing
an inch of snow fell during the night
drawing lines in the trees and
4380filling bushes with snowberries, big ones,
fork blossoms
at least
more fell
than rose
I Look Up Guff and Find the First
4385I look up guff and find the first
thing I learned about Babylon, the
gufa, the round wicker boats
in the fourth-grade reader! and I
remember the camels slinking high
4390against the flat, low line in the
background
with the aerial twist of leafage
at the palm top:
I can taste the sand now that I could
4395taste then, the muddy yellow river,
I feel the gristy hot soup of it now
that I did then!
mean business
the split between us
4400snow remains (remains
of snow) out under
the woodsedge brush
and lee of the put-out
Christmas tree, there a dab
4405(white scab)
and up here before the big yew
which brought the wind
paused to a crescent fall-out
histories of past
4410motions thawing away into motions,
runlets and trickles,
histories of redispositions
I cry nothingness nothingness as long
as the inadequate, the issuistic, is
4415proposed: I cry nothingness nothingness
to open space for the more nearly
adequate should it be deeply spoken for or of:
the dialectical
sways
4420in on the clarification of
oversimplification
and falls in to opposite or
indifferent tendencies:
and after heavy losses on both sides
4425burns itself out in error and
grief and astonished self-correction
only to go a little way
too far the other way,
take on concentration,
4430force, and direction,
lean down into an assertion
that challenges, tests others
and then the opposite sway
falls into motion
4435with heavy losses, etc.
nothing achieved apparently but excuses
to form energies idly potential, test
belief, swell the capacity to tolerate tragedy:
the economies, the allowances and costs, are so
4440finely adjusted, broadly and thoroughly applicable,
it is hard to believe the absurd design, haphazard:
though it would be dialectically just for economy to
be grounded in happenstance because only at the level
of absolute freedom of bit could swells of new
4445information rise to alter the valuations of the economies
the weather today continues
recent trends: 35 at dawn,
near 40 now at 10:37 a.m.,
supposed to go maybe to 45:
4450high for tomorrow 40:
the tiger lilies are green
nubs standing in ice:
I see a hollyhock leaf
or so lying on the ground,
4455still green, the snow cover
having kept it: they say
there are snowdrops up
(a switch from the downs) and
crocuses are heaving off
4460shelves and roofs
One at One with His Desire
One at one with his desire
slurps not the bone soup
of syllables
but rises to the other’s
4465rose and falls immediately
from
feeding desire
to recollection or anticipation
of desire
4470the business of the day
not bending the contour
out of circle
one not at one with his
desire has not a whole
4475intention
and consequently no place
to go unqualified
or any single thing to
look for but one aspect
4480of himself knows the
otherness of another aspect
so that he cannot become
disentangled
into other otherness
4485all singers are blind, of course,
for the same reason that they
do not see the world
but thickets of
complication between
4490themselves and their desire:
so much loss for the little
rescue of a lilt, a passing
fine turn, a modulation
practiced and true:
4495art’s
nonbeing’s
dark consolation:
what a nice stanza! imagine just going
on: I think I’ve invented
4500rooms to walk through
or stand amazed
or lie sleepy in:
it is no place, though,
to rehearse the flesh
4505of the beloved,
it is no place to touch
or taste
enter or leave:
it is dry delight, whatever
4510service remains when
the church closes:
the sweepstakes of
no desire
whole as fulfillment:
4515the sweetest passer of time
scheduled for emptiness:
the drug that makes erasure
bliss: an illusion some
of the uneasy can cover
4520misery with:
still when you think of the
nourishment of such delight as
over starvation,
what a numb pale
4525paradise! how constant
the music
dwelling among the constant
bushes, the deathlessness only
lifelessness can know
4530one not at one with his
desire still has to desire
so much more than nothing
this stanza compels
its way along: a
4535break will humble it:
form consumes:
form eliminates:
form forms the form
that extracts the elixir from
4540the passages of change:
well, we mustn’t let this
form reverse itself
into an opposite
though parallel
4545largely similar insistence:
must we?
a marvelous morning
dull gray aflood with the possibility of light
live unknown!
4550(the protean densitya pane’s
of that!)mirror
unmonitored bylets
the clichés of praiseeverything
through
4555well, no, the light changed
away into indistinguishableif you froze
gray, flicking wet dashes,a fog, that’s,
gravity-sprung ellipses, onturned loose on
the windowpane:a bluster, how
4560colder, foggier, suddenly:snow-fine’s
a front entering us doorsthe stuff today
/ /
we have become now in
the afternoon balled up
4565horizonless in pearly
mist, a billion bits of snow
jostling this
way and that, coming
down and putting
4570differentiation down downy:
the temperature dropped
in an hour twenty degrees an hour
an hour
sheet-deep in sleet
4575I haven’t written as
many words as an hour’s
grains of sleet
and so far only a scattering
impression of white
4580has risen from the lawn:
one should go on till one’s
hue is
unmistakeable
nature goes so far to make
4585us one of a kind
and treat us all alike
Dull Lull
Dull lull
palustral
mule
4590logging a
swampsull
pompous
ramps
amperage
4595palatial
labial
mull
gulls
dropped t
o eenzie teens last
4600night and snowed
three inches
now at noon it’s
the biggest teen
the car was crunchy and
4605crusty with
frozen rain in the windshield
wipers, stuck,
and the door wouldn’t break
open and every window was
4610snowed white,
tribulation’s Parian wreaths
(hark, a footnote)
hurdygurdy hurlyburly
loveydovey
4615with the snow white
as snow and the light
bright as day
one sees too much to see
outside
4620//1:50 p.m.
though it is
warm by the
window and though
the garageroof snow
4625cannot but melt
and tinkle twinklefree
at the eaves
still the thermometer
has not budged up a bit
4630all day
standing right where it
is regardless of what-all
the sun pours it on day
and (elsewhere) night
4635but the air masses will come
variably from here and there
and they warm and cool in
cycles longer than a day
longer than a week maybe
4640even longer than a year
as long maybe as the 11
year sunspot cycle or
sunspot cycles well
you get the point
4645just because you
have a fair day you
can’t expect the
temperature to
shoot right up
4650to seventy like
I told this
writing
student of
mine who
4655was a real
tomato
I said you don’t say to a
tomato you just set out make me
a tomato you say to it
4660make leaves and stems and
roots and branches, acquire
an abundant presence, and