by A. R. Ammons
day, high blue, that won’t leave
drop or dampening anywhere
by noon: even the brook way off
10trickles clinging to the ledges: how many
territories are riddled with routes, easements
to the brook banks, as grackles, robins,
catbirds get through: the snake lies
all the way long in and dimples
15the transparence with the brilliant
surfacing of two diamond nostrils, needlepoints
that give the whole length air: the
pheasant keeps to underbrush on his way:
a salamander is sticking with the wet
20leaves under my leaky outdoor faucet.
1978 (1979)
Mountain Wind
I went out into the cancellations of the wind
and stood still
my arms up stiff
like shrubs
5Oh I said I have discovered my consequence
This celebration of
water and lust is not
my celebration but a speech
the deep says and sends the wind through
10I touched the sharp tips
of stalks and stood in the lone
hurry of time down the mountain slope
1967 (1973)
Night Finding
Open and naked under the big snow
the hill cemetery by the falls
looks felled to stump stone
and the rich spray of the summer
5falls gathers absent into
glazes of ice wall: here in the
backyard thicket sway-floats
of honeysucklebush brush
(once misted berry red)
10bend down to solid touch,
and weed clumps break off
into halfway teepees:
pheasant in the earliest pearl
of dusk bluster in, swirls of
15landing and looking, and settled
to the dusk mode, walk under
the snow slants and shelters easing
through brush fox would noticeably jar.
1978 (1980)
Fourth Dimension
Reason can’t end:
it is discourse, motion
to find motion, reason to
find reason to abandon
5reason: when the argument
no longer thruways, the
road closes: poetry can
come complete, take on
shape, end into
10winding up itself, any
violation of which
totally violating:
the shape does not depend
elsewhere to make itself
15felt: it is as
it is: it can’t be cast
aside except to cast that
shape aside, no part in it
free to cast free any
20part: improved, it
concludes in dust,
an end both as
itself and not as itself.
Country Music
Snow melt and flood
rushes finished, the
brook evens down to
groundwater—black
5clarity, water glass,
of the central bed
bending white spill-arc
hooks over the ledge!
oh, the lolling, timeless
10music, inharmony so
various it finds harmony’s
underlying mix: but
the next stepledge
upstream sends down
15high, thin, hushed
_________
tones, an obbligato,
the far range filtered
free to a band of drowse.
1978 (1978)
Wiring
Radiance comes from
on high and, staying,
sends down silk
lines to the flopping
5marionette, me, but
love comes from
under the ruins and
sends the lumber up
limber into leaf that
10touches so high it nearly
puts out the radiance
1978 (1979)
Sunday at McDonald’s
In the bleak land of foreverness no
one lives but only, crushed and buffeted,
now: now, now, now every star glints
perishing while now slides under and
5away, slippery as light, time-vapor:
what can butterflies do or clear-eyed
babies gumming french fries—nature
is holding them, somehow, veering them
off into growth holdings, forms
10brought to peaks of splendor, sharp
energies burring into each other to
set off new progressions through the
_________
rustle and mix, rot and slush: is
this the way it is: sometimes a man
15will stand up, clear and settled as
a bright day, and seem to look through
the longest times and roilings to
the still, star-bending, fixed ahead.
1977 (1979)
Sweetened Change
The small white-headed man pops out
his side and begins the ten-minute
procedure of getting her out the car:
he unloads the wheelchair first:
5the wife, snow white, gets turned
around, the toes so carefully tender
and tended, till she sits looking as
if headed sideways: she finds in herself
weight’s structure and, rising, falls
10translated to the wheels: such
satisfaction and relief! but, now, the
leg must be elevated, billows and strings,
and special consideration given the spine’s
new crimp: it all works out, some
15tucking in and looking around: off they roll
through the hospital doors: soon the quick
man is out again, squeals away to parking
spaces allotted longer stalls of time:
he jogs back by and back through the doors
20he goes: one mate gives out and the other
buzzes fast to sing he’s not alone and idle.
1978 (1979)
Parting
She was already lean when
a stroke or two slapped
her face like drawn
claw prints: akilter, she
5ate less and
sat too much on the edge
of beds looking a width too
wide out of windows:
she lessened: getting
10out for a good day, she sat
on the bench still and
thin as a porch post:
the children are all
off, she would think, but a
15minute later,
startle, where are the children,
as if school had let
out: her husband watched
her till loosened away himself
20for care: then,
seeming to know but never
quite sure, she was put in
a slightly less hopeful
setting: she watched her
25husband tremble in to call
and shoot up high head-bent
eyes: her mind
flashed clear through, she was
sure of it, she had seen
30that one before: her husband
_________
longed to say goodbye or else
hello, but the room stiffened
as if two lovers had just caught
on sight, every move rigid
35misfire in that perilous fire.
1978 (1978)
Feel Like Traveling On
Sit down and be patient:
sure, it’s a beautiful,
endless, lonely Sunday
afternoon: the old people<
br />
5are in their graves:
the old places are deserted:
the times of all those
times, faces, flavors
a few minds left hold:
10sure, ahead the chief
business is tearing the rest
of the way loose: but by
the empty take the full:
sit down, find something
15to read: a grand possibility
was made: who knows
what became of it
1978 (1980)
Poverty
I’m walking home from, what,
a thousandth walk this year
along the same macadam’s edge
(pebbly) the ragweed rank
5but not blooming yet,
a rose cloud passed to the
east that against sundown would be
blue-gray, the moon up nearly
full, splintering
10through the tips of street pine,
and the hermit lark downhill
in a long glade cutting
spirals of musical ice, and I
realize that it is not the same for
15me as for others, that
being here to be here
with others is for others.
(1979)
Givings
Why not let the name go with the body
since things will be
as they appear
a shambles of change with now and then an absolute
5loss and most changes, re-directions not
the kind you can bend back into shape
and not even in the midridge of the overspill
an island to stop on and consider in stillness time
passing
10but only in the interweavings, flows back and
forth, under and over, around and through
does reality hold
to a single face its name and that can
on a stormy spring morning seem so underbuilt
15with dream, reality & appearance flow together away
1978 (1979)
An Improvisation for the Stately Dwelling
This fall morning is pretty much
like a fall morning
the bottoms of poplars
and tops of beeches
5leafless
a wind NNW
has re-lifted the geese
and sent them southerly
I know a man whose cancer has
10got him just to the point
he looks changed by a flight of stairs
people pass him and speak
extra-brightly
he asks nothing else
15he is like a rock
reversed, that is, the rock has a solid
body and shakes only
reflected in the water but he shakes
in body only,
20his spirit a boulder of light
nature
includes too much
and art can’t include enough
the sky is soft this morning
25all gray,
regioned here and there with ivory
light
the flames of climbing vines are
shedding out, falling back,
30stringing fire
the brook almost blisters with
cool equations among the fallen colors
what is to become of us we know
how are we to be taken by it or take it
(1979)
An Improvisation for Jerald Bullis
It’s not much of a fall with
hemlocks
the new green already
advanced,
5needles inwardly hidden
turn brown
and make not much of shedding
catch the right
windy day to catch
10the show right
one day in a high wind,
every ready needle already
gone, nothing
will fall
15though the billows of boughs
heave and slosh
but another day after a
calm
the needles wait in a small wind
20for the windtwist to reap them,
a bunch, salience, weave, or warp
of them coming down
spinning or
striking boughs and, whooshed up,
25spinning again
till
on the ground
a fairly unnoticeable, diffuse
browning
30comes over things,
particular needles subsumed and
nothing outlined
_________
so many falls all summer and
even earlier in earliest spring and
35later falls than fall, wild carrot
seeds held in ribbed cups
sprinkling out over ice
the speaker, delivered out of himself,
places his “I”
40anywhere
in rose or rat
and feels the speech he has deserved to
say,
himself so much given over, unfolded, that he
45is mostly without interest
light fills volumes
shade clears
the big garden spider sits in air between
the two hedge headlands and doesn’t move
50enough to close down for dusk
(1979)
Persistences
Wind, though in the temple,
criticizes the pillars,
from bronze walls and set
floors
5takes haze away, a small
flour
given back to the desert:
nuzzles into alcoves and porticoes
as if glad to
10take on the curvature
_________
and drowse
but leaks and brushes away again
restless with what
remains a while:
15the theorem of the wind
no pigment, wall, or word
disproves: propositions
scatter before it,
grow up in brier thickets
20and thistle thickets:
still, from our own ruins,
we thrash out the
snakes and mice,
shoo the lean ass away,
25and plant a row of something:
we know,
we say to the wind, but we will
come back again and back:
in debris we make a holding as
30insubstantial and permanent as mirage.
1974 (1978)
WORLDLY HOPES (1982)
to the memory of Elliott Coleman
Room Conditioner
After rain I
walk and looking
down glimpse
the moon: I
5back up to see
and the puddle splices
onto two hundred
thousand miles of
height two
10hundred thousand
miles of depth
1977 (1978)
Extravaganza
A leaf picked
up by the
wind could
(if it could)
5tell a good
deal about
big affairs, volumes,
currents, long
tugs, ascensions,
10wheels quite
truly and be
(dropped by a
_________
ditchhedge) still
nothing
15more than a bit of
nothing.
1976 (1980)
Righting Wrongs
Dew turns
the burgundy smoke
bush ice-white,
puffy airiness
5glittering
substance-low:
impatient with dull
wind’s and slow sun’s
/> lightenings,
10I kicking jar
a shower out, losing,
though, ice for rise.
1979 (1981)
Subsumption
From
scientific and esthetic
ramblings & bewilderings,
voice, the clearing
5through tangled
tone,
will sometimes
just do
something, blow
10a leaf off a
branch
without
ambiguity or equivocation
or, a rose,
15unwind
into
clarity
simply
1974
Immoderation
If something is too
big, enlarging it
may correct it:
a skinny thing
5acquires great force
pushed next to nothing.
Vines
In late August scarlet
fire breaks
out in the spruce top,
a flame flamelike
5in disposition but
coal-still
to glow but then,
the spruce holding
green, October comes
10and frost flakes fire
off the skinny
highwires of arising.
Extrication
I tangled with
the world to
let it go
but couldn’t free
5it: so I made
words
to wrestle in my
stead and went
off silent to
10the quick flow
of brooks, the
slow flow of stone
Spruce Woods
It’s so still
today that a
dipping bough means
a squirrel
