by A. R. Ammons
are the windings saved:
wiggles of brook worms, earworms,
10flickers of fire on
timber or walls or
(lostly) stars—shades of
actions, where are they:
there where motions
15are stilled, stored, rehearsed,
recalled, there, there!
1976 (1977)
Strolls
The brook gives me
sparkles plenty, an
abundance, but asks
nothing of me:
5snow thickets
and scrawny
snowwork of hedgerows,
still gold weeds, and
snow-bent cedar gatherings
10provide
feasts of disposition
(figure, color, weight, proportion)
and require
not even that I notice:
15the near-winter quartermoon
sliding high almost
into color at four-thirty—
the abundance of clarity
along the rose ridge line!
20alone, I’m not alone:
a standoffishness and reasonableness
in things finds
me or I find that
in them: sand, falls,
25furrow, bluff—
things one, speaking things
not words, would
have found to say.
1976 (1978)
Getting Through
The brook has worked
out the prominences of
a bend so as to find
curvature’s sliding
5speed and now thaw
or shower can reach it
to shell the shale out
from an overhung ledge:
the ledge bends way
10over as if to contemplate
its solution in a spill:
right now I think
the skinny old arborvita’s
roots may be holding everything
15together: but when the spill
comes the brook will have
another heap
in its way, another
shambles to get
20through or around: or
over: how much time does
a brook have: how much
time a brook has!
(1978)
Eventually Is Soon Enough
Lee of wind-skinned rises
long drifts of
fallout snow soak in the thaw:
the brook, the sky bright
5for days, steps lightly
down ledge steps:
anything black enough
to be furrow soil will turn
out to be old snow bank,
10trickling:
snowplows plowed snow
into shrubrows that give
reservoir humped mesh:
thickets that paused a lot
15out of the air
streak it with chilling shade,
cold huddling, keep
flood from falling,
give away a little at a
20time longer than
roofs and slanty, beam-turned banks do:
this soundless (no rain or
thunder) upstirring of
the brook!
25the mediations and mixtures,
flows and pauses: one sees on the bank
of a cleared ditch
swatches of ground moss so green
one thinks with relief
30spring won’t have to improve any on that.
1977 (1978)
Density
A bluejay’s the clarified
bush’s only ornament:
except for two or three
tan-fine leaves he
5rattles on a twig:
and there’s where summer’s
hidden trickle
got its tune, the end of
a corrugated pipe
10undercrossing the road:
and down there
farther where density
hid all but the hermit
lark’s song
15is a gang of wires, once
woodvine: winter
putting so much
away leaves too
much room to see.
1976 (1979)
Vehicle
I take myself, in
the goal of my destiny,
the way the wind takes
me, something to
5stir, run, and dismiss,
or the way dust
or falling snow take
me (obstruction,
scaffolding) a form
10of delay—that is,
nothing to nothing:
but meanwhile my
body knows the wind and
calls it out,
15and dust and snow,
the running brook,
praise themselves seen in
my praising sight.
(1979)
Response
Fuzzy baby-spider ball
hanging in the spirea bush,
the harder the wind blew the
tighter
5it shrank, shaking and
bobbing, but after the wind
calmed widened airy with radiality:
but yesterday late
I blew one time hard on it and it
10spilled spooling to the ground:
fine beads, the babies stirred,
cleaning themselves up in
reverse web-flow: one bead
went off a way on a haywire web
15but, back to mainline, came
stringing up, the final bead:
dark tightens the ball hard.
(1979)
Easter Morning
I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
5as on my lap a child
not to grow or grow old but dwell on
it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
10wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
15with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left
when I go back to my home country in these
fresh far-away days, it’s convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
20look how he’s shooting up, and the
trinket aunts who always had a little
something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark
or a penny or nickel, and uncles who
were the rumored fathers of cousins
25who whispered of them as of great, if
troubled, presences, and school
teachers, just about everybody older
(and some younger) collected in one place
waiting, particularly, but not for
30me, mother and father there, too, and others
close, close as burrowing
under skin, all in the graveyard
assembled, done for, the world they
used to wield, have trouble and joy
35in, gone
_________
the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,
to go on into change, blessings and
horrors, but stands there by the road
40where the mishap occurred, crying out for
help, come and fix this or we
can’t get by, but the great ones who
were to return, they could not or did
not hear and went on in a flurry and
45now, I say in the graveyard, here
lies the flurry, now it can’t come
back
with help or helpful asides, now
we all buy the bitter
incompletions, pick up the knots of
50horror, silently raving, and go on
crashing into empty ends not
completions, not rondures the fullness
has come into and spent itself from
I stand on the stump
55of a child, whether myself
or my little brother who died, and
yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for
for me it is the dearest and the worst,
it is life nearest to life which is
60life lost: it is my place where
I must stand and fail,
calling attention with tears
to the branches not lofting
boughs into space, to the barren
65air that holds the world that was my world
though the incompletions
(& completions) burn out
standing in the flash high-burn
momentary structure of ash, still it
70is a picture-book, letter-perfect
Easter morning: I have been for a
walk: the wind is tranquil: the brook
works without flashing in an abundant
tranquility: the birds are lively with
75voice: I saw something I had
never seen before: two great birds,
maybe eagles, blackwinged, whitenecked
and -headed, came from the south oaring
the great wings steadily; they went
80directly over me, high up, and kept on
due north: but then one bird,
the one behind, veered a little to the
left and the other bird kept on seeming
not to notice for a minute: the first
85began to circle as if looking for
something, coasting, resting its wings
on the down side of some of the circles:
the other bird came back and they both
circled, looking perhaps for a draft;
90they turned a few more times, possibly
rising—at least, clearly resting—
then flew on falling into distance till
they broke across the local bush and
trees: it was a sight of bountiful
95majesty and integrity: the having
patterns and routes, breaking
from them to explore other patterns or
better ways to routes, and then the
return: a dance sacred as the sap in
100the trees, permanent in its descriptions
as the ripples round the brook’s
ripplestone: fresh as this particular
flood of burn breaking across us now
from the sun.
1977 (1979)
White Dwarf
As I grow older
arcs swollen inside
now and then fall
back, collapsing, into
5forming walls:
the temperature shoots
up with what I am not
and am: from
multiplicities, dark
10knots, twanging twists,
structures come into sight,
chief of these
a blade of fire only now
so late, so sharp and standing,
15burning confusion up.
1976
Distraction
During my glorious,
crazy years, I
went about the business of
the universe relentlessly,
5inquired of goat
and zygote,
frill and floss,
touched, tasted,
prodded, and tested and as
10it were kept the
whole thing going
by
central attention’s
central node:
15now my anklebones hurt
when I stand up
or the mail truck
drops by to bury
me under two
20small obligations: I
can’t quite remember
what call I went to find
or why so much
fell to me: in fact,
25sometimes
a whole green sunset
will wash dark
as if it could go
right by without me.
1978 (1980)
Rapids
Fall’s leaves are redder than
spring’s flowers, have no pollen,
and also sometimes fly, as the wind
schools them out or down in shoals
5or droves: though I
have not been here long, I can
look up at the sky at night and tell
how things are likely to go for
the next hundred million years:
10the universe will probably not find
a way to vanish nor I
in all that time reappear.
(1980)
Neighbors
How little I have really cared about nature: I always
thought the woods idyllic and let it go at that: but,
look, one tree, the near pine, cracked off in high wind,
_________
dry rot at the ground, and coming down sheared every
5branch off one side of the sweetgum: one tree, trying
to come up under another, has only one bough in light:
an ice storm some years ago broke the tops off several
trees that now splinter into sprouts: one sweetgum,
bent over bow-like to the ground, has given up its
10top and let an arrow of itself rise midway: ivy has
made Ann Pollard’s pine an ivy tree: I can’t regain
the lost idyllic at all, but the woods are here with us.
1975 (1977)
Keepsake
I feel the brook as it were
teased and betrayed me, its
finery of glitter enchanting
my mind and leading me off
5and off again down the accurate
indifferences of mechanical
shift and spill, inexhaustible
burn of glint and glide: oh,
for when I could give no more
10attention up and needed to be
looked for, the brook kept
its old lessons tucked away
as usual in its flowings and
answered only as I guessed it:
15but you, lover, prowled the world
to be found and, found, found me:
if you part your lips, the
shifts and spills in your
eyes will break me open: this
20lost, I’m unlost and unbetrayed.
1979 (1979)
Antithesis
If no material and no resort
will hold us in place,
placate and pacify us,
then we have to make up
5something out of nothing
(a pliable material) and
loft it (it is not heavy)
high enough to reach beyond
the highest branch we could
10pull down, and we have to make it
of perfect understanding
(know-it-all silence) and
able to respond in the fullest
measure (the other side of
15emptiness, the broadest
welcome): where can
dense, straw-strung flesh
cry to for its essential
answering other except beyond,
20way, way beyond the star
points resolving into galaxies.
1978 (1979)
Traveling Shows
I found vision and it
was terrific, the sight
enabling and abiding, but
I couldn’t get these
5old bones there and light’s
a byproduct of
rapid decomposition:
sick, meal-swollen children
10refused it:
no one breathes the held
air in words’ winds:
more than could be
promised, the many
15graces of accurate
turnings, or even thought
to seek, I found, I
found: it was nothing:
the ghost of the made
20world, leaving, enters
the real—no, not that much:
the real world
succeeds the made and,
burnt out, shuts down.
Breaking Out
I have let all my balloons aloose
what will become of them now
pricked they will show some weight
or caught under a cloud lack
5ebullience to feel through
but they are all let loose
yellow, red, blue, thin-skinned, tough
and let go they have put me down
I was an earth thing all along
10my feet are catching in the brush
1977 (1978)
Range
In the storm window’s upper left
hand corner, between the panes,
a tiny spider angles to catch one
of two fall flies thrice his size:
5the flies, addled, sidle about,
over and away, and buzz loose
confined between the windows and
bowl over into the corner occasionally,
snapping webs, guy wires, cross
10references: the predator feints
at the fly-throughs and, missing,
sits before diving to re-build:
it tests patience when what you need
is too big to handle: but the flies
15may weaken and wander where the weakest
web can hold down one of their
few possibilities left,
while the fine spider may go on
living on air if need be till this plenty.
(1979)
Dry Spell Spiel
It’s so far to the brook the squirrel
nips dew off the garage roof
dipping down from tile tip to tip,
stopping head sideways and one paw up in still
5perception (fear) then melting
into motion and need: this is another
