by A. R. Ammons
This Poem Concerns
This poem concerns
5125the elm over past
the windows of the other room
the elm includes the weather
this poem is largely about
the weather because
5130weather is a major influence
on elms
you’ve heard I know that the dutch elms
are gone
this is to remind you
5135that they are still gone
but I heard
we come from upa man once
to 30 billion yrswhose thing
of oblivion but thinkwas done and
5140of not even awhose race
little more lightlyrun say
he was ready
the great flash their selves
onto, obliterating, surroundings:
5145they are normal:
cutting back, undercutting, schools
us to lessenings, including
the total lessening, nothing:
from what bin more gigantic than stars
5150could the diet be doled:
doled! poured out!
when the biggest thing, the grand repository,
we have is oblivion, slick with emptiness
will the fed few
5155feed on
cut-aways
from the schooled starved
we applaud the loudmouth who
breaks through into the feast of our portion!
5160could shed your shingles
could shingle your shed
today was a fair day all day
and most of the snow got
mopped up except
5165here and there next to
trees, fences, in thickets
hard to get at
I turn to the word and it brings me
anything:
5170I no longer go to look about in the world:
I have become so lonely
that only the word
is free enough and large enough to take my
mind off
5175the world going day
by day over the brink
used up but unused:
how thankful I feel
bent gutless over
5180the vomited void
to have at least the word
going anywhere fetching anything:
pretty soon it may have
brought so much
5185it will not need to go off again
and then the word will
draw me up about it
The Word Cries Out
The word cries out
and I fetch
5190a thing or thought is noted
and from need or in
response to pressure
urgency for a verbal version arises
and words dash in
5195taking trial positions,
sort and re-sort themselveswor(l)d
into provisional clusters
and whole strings:
a marshal, severest linesman,
5200shouts out down the ranks
and ta-tum
the verbal version
with last minute stumbling or twitching
on the edges
5205declares itselfthere was a heavy
its trimmestfrost of snow on the garage’s
roof scales but the sun
I hunt and peckwiped it off
leaf throughor the garage crawled away
5210check alignment
do it again
start over
wait a while
look up
5215reconsider, readjust:
friendly word, image,
you hold my attention:
even as attention fails
and revives with work,
5220stirring and re-doing:
now as many snowflakes as you would find
bees working a quince clump, flakes big
as mayflies, run or stall or turn or rise
in the wind all together, flocks, swarms,
5225droves of things: this may be where fish
got the notion of turning in a single
action (it snows over oceans)
I Woke Up at 6 and It Was
I woke up at 6 and it was
light enough
5230to shell peas or water begonias:
midwinter, fine-work would
have had
to wait till eight:
two days off from spring,
5235two hours of light
attached to both ends of the
day, the middle position
will enlarge, going on
to four hours either end,
5240sixteen dark switched to
sixteen light:
the reason it makes
no difference what people
think
5245is that they don’t think
enough to make any
difference
the weather got us this week:
Tuesday an alldayer, a
5250heavy snow with the temperature
dropping, dropping (from the
shales of the morning) so low
that last night, low teens,
jungle escalations, ropes,
5255vines, fronds, seized the
windows crystal-blind again:
today
the sun came up
in light,
5260to warm to thirty: that will do
in the garage snow (an inch
on the windy side, one to three
inches on the hemlock side):
yesterday at the university as, my
5265wont, I mused out my window,
I saw a certain twist and
horny warp
registered in the deep-long
eaves icicles and since
5270Tuesday night had been windy
I thought, my word, icicles
summarize the rate of melt
and wind direction, are a glacio-spiral
version of a wind-rose: nature
5275that will uproot an eavesload
of history
can be so careful of history
A Flock of My Days
A flock of my days
either gone already or to
5280come rises up
in a flurry and flies into
itself
setting off
a maelstrom descent, whirlpool bloom
5285with a fine hollow stem figuring for a
bottomless source
in yesterday’s dusk hickory,
a flicker black on skylight,
not a grackle but a
5290robin! the behavior exact,
year’s first!
pecking his breast, grooming,
regarding the groundcover of
snow unsharply
5295(but today the temp is to go
to 60, worm raising weather)
yesterday when melt was
commencing late
in the afternoon
5300one icicle with a fringehold
on the eaves
waved back and forth
windily
as if hinged,
5305its hold become so light
but now this morning
the temperature nearing fifty
the eaves rain with
melt, rooftiles starting to show
5310radiance’s darkness
(too much light on too much snow)
I guess the lady next door
when she had the elm thinned
from the thicket
5315didn’t know
snow would cap a hemispheric cone
on the left stump
they say it took some days
for the cries in No Man’s Land
5320to die down: first
there was a noise
of pain
but a few dawns and dus
ks
settled things
5325down to here and there
a filament of dissent
and then the dawn came wherein
the peace was incredible
You Can’t Imitate
You can’t imitatethe extent to
5330anybody reallywhich you can’t
and the extentimitate anyone
to whichreally is enough
you can’t isoriginality
enough originality
5335one gainsafter another blow
with immortalityI pick up
a lastingloose wood
tombunder the elm,
hard branches, the
5340skinny bones
of a flesh
if you caught aleft
dusk-glimpsethat was leaves
as a first seeing
5345of the thin-tapering
hemlocks (a rowringneck &
of raving beauties)redwing
you’d think they’d,(redneck &
waggled and whipped,ringwing)
5350worn off in the
wind that way
Stevens, you should be here
now with the ringnecks
and rigorous rednecks
5355and the green billows
of grass with drained
hunks of black-old
snow floating in them
and the ringnecks
5360stirred by a nosey dog
racing into the thickets!
if you could hear the
brook like a bear breaking
through the thicket
5365(the thicket floor
a manuscript patches
of snow illuminate)
yours truly
yours treely
5370“live unknown” is
no fun unless
you have to work at it
why kill
yourself when
5375you can
die
without
your helptrees fall to
the wind
5380and falls’
murmuring
trees the wind
the comet mingling
with us this
5385week (a
windy week)
will
be back in
fifty
5390thousand yearsthe grave may
not be its
goal but that’s
where it lands
the world’s too serious
5395to take seriously &
too funny to take lightlyfaint &
fall over
Old Milling
say to the race
5400your run’s
run its race
say to the run
your race’s
race’s run
Spring’s Old Hat Is Older
5405Spring’s old hat is older
than hills:
but spring’s skinny shade
(as old)
gives cedar, pine, spruce,
5410upstart and low-profile,
the jump on maple,
elm, latecomer
my yew ball
is ten feet high and wide
5415(it doesn’t roll in
but unrolls the wind)
you can stand behind it
when there’re insistent breezes
and it’s like standing
5420on the bank of
a current and even if the wind
is sucky
blowy with variability
the whole
5425context
is diminished in a matrix
of holding
The Temperature Fell
The temperature fell
through yesterday afternoon:
5430big clouds came
and winds rose: and fell
and the clouds came and went
and the temperature fell on
through the night
5435plunging into the teens
from a daytime high
above seventy
today though the sun is out at
times and
5440though the wind, steady,
has lessened,
the temperature is staying
where it fell,
snowflakes feeling
5445their way (more
numerous than far-off legions)
through the air
in fabrics too fine for “snowing”
goalless as a ping
5450pong table I’m
as a free-versite
also netless
(courtless)
systems, structures,
5455big hunks of culture
do not melt and flow
directly
one to the other but
turn
5460articulate
dis-poise
often on single glints of
perception,
the exception sharply noticed
5465become the groundwork
of the next familiar:
as one who looks
to the mechanisms and costs
(sad joy
5470breaking away into acceptance)
in the “flow” of systems and
structures
I cannot stop to see if
at any point a thing
5475still moving was
satisfactorily complete:
the sky’s stabiles
hasten and churn:
I befriend, or hope to,
5480gently,
motion: it is my slow veracity
and belief:
the conveyance of discard is
the arising of beauty:
5485perception, flat, impersonal, out-of-context
perception disfamiliars, erupts motion:
my life (pent)
misspent &
(piddling pity)
5490unspent
has poured itself off into
a big jar, jug, cistern, pool,
bog, mere, lake, bay, or
ocean of grief but
5495this was a morning, like
any other, for anything,
a whistling colleague,
an assignation finally
accomplished, a birth,
5500death, a pheasant screeching
achieve an identity,
find a direction, such achieving
leaves behind as much as it finds
choose short-term goals and having
5505realized them, wait for the grave
wandering afloat the landscape
to find you
have long-range, even impossible,
goals and
5510you will complete no work
but you will,
eyes on the sky, stumble astonished
into the grave,
your work left
5515to others, an inheritance
imbalance providing the
illusion of direction,
the loops, sways
of exaggeration, we can, ah,
5520and, therefore
could a shady
spot of the peace
everlasting patch
the wretched ways
5525and byways of the
lusty & hard-to-take!
oh, but we should not rail!
everything but our understanding
is flawless
5530the hemlocks are
sensitive wind instruments
you can
judge by the thicket
that it’s calm
5535but just then the tips of
hemlock branches pick
up the frailest motions,
the long branches, you
know, rise out in high
5540bow-boughs from the trunk
and secondary branches
branch off,
a dense replication and
registration so that
5545when the wind blows branch
tip and branch tip
try out the sways and lofts
of space and
sure enough
5550here and there
branch tips intermingle
and where they often
intermingle (summarizing
prevailingness)
5555the tips lose needles,
fray,
and, no way proved to go,
the tip dies
and growth takes place at
5560another tip:
each way won or free:
a little past four
it has turned so clear
the sky bright blue
5565cold
the blacktipped brown
caterpillars
lured out
by yesterday’s heat
5570circle crinkled in the grass
now (one on the garage floor)
the teens cold working on
them: spring steps up
warmly saying
5575bud bloom sprout shoot
and arctic highs
mow the answering down:
to endure
a thing must speak
5580more slowly than
highs & lows
You Can
You can
walking with the wind
think yourself
5585becalmed
but turning to return
find yourself
in a ten-mile-an-hour gale
and on a great
5590bright
cold morning like
this that
calm thirty degrees
drops
5595chilling windchill degrees:
but the birds
are a chorus,
the jay’s big vocabulary:
the sparrow
5600is hauling straw
up to a streetlight
(nitelite)
sheets of ice standing in
v-bottomed ditches
5605and a vapor-ice
of white haze
on grass near water:
grackle, crow, cardinal,
robin, birds but no bees:
5610according to the weather forecast