The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2
Page 8
5has gone through.
(1980)
I Went Back
I went back
to my old home
and the furrow
of each year
5plowed like
surf across
the place had
not washed
memory away.
(1978)
Snow Roost
Last night the
fluffiest inhabitant
filled the
cedar forks deep, but this
5windy morning,
gusts blizzard-sharp
explode clumps of flight
into local blindings.
1978
Shading Flight In
Lit clouds diffuse tree
shadows etiolated long
across the grass-gold winter
lawn, trunks and branches as if
5risen aground to a deep
remembrance:
substances—there may not always
be wood, but insubstantial shadow
will, always find a solid source.
1980
Precious Weak Fields
Mercy’s so slight it’s like
a glitter-bit in granite or a single
pane-sun in snow flint or the warp-weave of
slice-light netting a shallows stone.
Night Chill
My big round yew
can stand a gust
into a million
presences: too
5many needles
to get through
to get through
except drift through:
birds in there peep and sleep,
10puffy in the slow hurry.
Calling
My endorsing song blocks out
to blot out, identifies in keyed
sets and replications,
high rises and office
5bldgs, baroque interiors and
mirroring exteriors (spelled out
intricacies) to obliterate into
emptiness, the promise,
cure, commencement, my
10self-endorsing song, flattened,
snaking its way out,
reaching to weave into its rise.
Reaction Rates
My hanging strawberry
pot stops drops
geometrically:
_________
I gush water in the
5pot top
and because of interior
runoff it
streams through the bottom
hole but
10because of interior
absorption stops
rather rapidly
1976
Progress Report
Now I’m
into things
so small
when I
5say boo
I disappear
Lost & Found
How I came to
be what I am
I can’t unwind
and what’s left
5from what I
was won’t
_________
turn my way
away so I
get upfront
10to ongoing
and seek in
the freshwater of
time breaking
into now
15the frail
possibilities
of a singular
start, the re-decision
to keep it up, till
20now (vanishing)
can become the slice
constantly
standing here.
1980
Epistemology
A bit of
truth
told pops
its pip
5and falls
small
into its
(if bitter)
_________
consequence
10but the bit
untold
avoided collects
about it
networks
15bindings
of disguise &
going
around
till, an
20enormous posture,
it can’t be
identified
solved or made
to disappear &
25so by
recalcitrance &
complication
comes
to represent
30the world
truly
ours.
1978 (1979)
The Role of Society in the Artist
Society sent me this invitation to go to
hell and
delighted not to be overlooked I thought
I could make arrangements to accommodate
5it and went off
where, however, I
_________
did the burning by myself, developing
fortunately some fairly thick shields
against blazing and some games
10one of which was verse by which I used
illusion to put the flames out,
turning flares into mirrors
of seeming: society
attracted to this bedazzlement wanted me
15to acknowledge how it had been
largely responsible and I said oh yes it gave
me the language by which to send me
clear invitations and society
designated me of social value and lifted me
20out of hell so I could better share
paradisal paradigms with it
and it said isn’t it generous
of society to let you walk here
far from hell—society does this because
25it likes your keen sense of acquired sight
& word: how wonderful of you to say so, I said,
and took some of whatever was being
passed around but every night went out
into the forest to spew fire
30that blazoned tree trunks and set
stumps afire and society found me out there
& warmed itself and said it liked my unconventional
verses best & I invited society to go to hell
1977 (1978)
Scribbles
To unwrite the writing, unweave, ravel out
the woven, unsay the spoken, and make hard
to perceive the seen and known—I go about
to happenstance, loose thread, coincidental
5margin and find (if on purpose) by accidence
the brook dimpling shallow through rocks and
think nothing clear on that surface or below
it! and clouds are a fuzzy subject, running
together in flat continuums or breaking
10filed away or, best and above it all, simply
dissolving: but the hard writing, the in-chipped
and scrawled, the cut and trenched, that must be
made palimpsest (too much truth already out)
so that the song that is the song of
15the hurt and lost cannot emerge through
the singing nor any dark taint light:
someday, I must read the text
but not now, let it not be now, not today
already listing with the grievances of avoidance
20but, weatherwise, transparent: or if I am lucky
I will so encushion it with the wires of
verseline, so rustle it with stuttering, or
burn it down with raving, the polish, that failing
sight will miss the failing seen or get no
25more from it than a haze of sense: my clear
writing . . . to confuse, subvert, renounce!
my babbling, to make dumb, my light, to hide!
_________
perplexity is such that sometimes it must be
embraced before it will clear, to the deep
30clear, when it may be put aside,
as a bee
puts aside color, pattern, flight when he reaches
at the stigma’s base the pure nectar:
as I may put writing aside someday to seek to know.
1978
Hermit Lark
Shy lark! I’ll bet it took a while to get you
perfect, your song quintessential, hermit lark,
just back from wherever you winter: I learn my real
and ideal self from you, the right to sing
5alone without shame!
water over stone makes useless brook music; your
music unbearably clear after rain
drops water breaking through air, the dusk air
like shaded brookwater, substanced clarity!
10I learn from you and lose the edginess I speak of
to one other only, my mate, my long beloved, and
make a shield not so much against the world,
though against its hardest usages, as
for tenderness’s small leeways: how
15hard to find the bird in the song! the music
breaks in from any height or depth of the spiral
and whirling up or down, jamming, where does it
leave off: shy bird, welcome home, I love your
_________
song and keep my distance: hold, as I know you
20won’t, through the summer this early close visitation
behind the garage and in the nearby brush:
you will pair off and hiding find deeper
shyness yet: be what you must and will be:
I listen and look to found your like in me.
1978 (1980)
Shit List; or, Omnium-Gatherum of Diversity into Unity
You’ll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are:
gosling shit (which J. Williams said something
was as green as), fish shit (the generality), trout
shit, rainbow trout shit (for the nice), mullet shit,
5sand dab shit, casual sloth shit, elephant shit
(awesome as process or payload), wildebeest shit,
horse shit (a favorite), caterpillar shit (so many dark
kinds, neatly pelleted as mint seed), baby rhinoceros
shit, splashy jaybird shit, mockingbird shit
10(dive-bombed with the aim of song), robin shit that
oozes white down lawnchairs or down roots under roosts,
chicken shit and chicken mite shit, pelican shit, gannet
shit (wholesome guano), fly shit (periodic), cockatoo
shit, dog shit (past catalog or assimilation),
15cricket shit, elk (high plains) shit, and
tiny scribbled little shrew shit, whale shit (what
a sight, deep assumption), mandril shit (blazing
blast off), weasel shit (wiles’ waste), gazelle shit,
_________
magpie shit (total protein), tiger shit (too acid
20to contemplate), moray eel and manta ray shit, eerie
shark shit, earthworm shit (a soilure), crab shit,
wolf shit upon the germicidal ice, snake shit, giraffe
shit that accelerates, secretary bird shit, turtle
shit suspension invites, remora shit slightly in
25advance of the shark shit, hornet shit (difficult to
assess), camel shit that slaps the ghastly dry
siliceous, frog shit, beetle shit, bat shit (the
marmoreal), contemptible cat shit, penguin shit,
hermit crab shit, prairie hen shit, cougar shit, eagle
30shit (high totem stuff), buffalo shit (hardly less
lofty), otter shit, beaver shit (from the animal of
alluvial dreams)—a vast ordure is a broken down
cloaca—macaw shit, alligator shit (that floats the Nile
along), louse shit, macaque, koala, and coati shit,
35antelope shit, chuck-will’s-widow shit, alpaca shit
(very high stuff), gooney bird shit, chigger shit, bull
shit (the classic), caribou shit, rasbora, python, and
razorbill shit, scorpion shit, man shit, laswing
fly larva shit, chipmunk shit, other-worldly wallaby
40shit, gopher shit (or broke), platypus shit, aardvark
shit, spider shit, kangaroo and peccary shit, guanaco
shit, dolphin shit, aphid shit, baboon shit (that leopards
induce), albatross shit, red-headed woodpecker (nine
inches long) shit, tern shit, hedgehog shit, panda shit,
45seahorse shit, and the shit of the wasteful gallinule.
1969 (1972)
Limits
Since the
unknown’s
truer
than the
5known
and since
mystery
can
make a well-known weed
10unreal
and since
bent we
break on
time that lets
15everything endure
changed
why not take
liberties
and love
20what is not
storm the intangible
for the lore
song’s lost in
1959 (1973)
Sizing
Some ideas hit
brush too thick
to mingle through
or clearings
5too wide to bound
Bride
for Minfong Ho
Sometimes a maple seed
can hold on so
tight it spins
way out on the wind strong
5enough to snap it free!
1978
Rainy Morning
Sometimes the ridge across
the way transluminous
emerges above the mist
and squares and detached rondures
5of vapory ground with
dairy barns and old trees
break out afloat
separated in high lyings
The Scour
It was so windy
last night the snow
got down nowhere
except up against something.
Meditation
Spot fires rifle the woods
and gold and scarlet
flash hilltop to hill,
hedgerows and fields waylaid giving
5way: the sky drops ash
to cover the gone
or spent and the long
build up of white
takes care of everything.
Oblivion’s Bloom
Struck head to
ground in
first cold
the bumblebee
5turns
in the sweetest
nectar yet
1977
Immortality
The double lanceolate
needlelike
hemlock leaf
will, falling, catch on
5a twitch of old
worm-silk
and, like a fall worm,
dingledangle breezy
all day in the noose
1976 (1978)
Design
The drop seeps whole
from boulder-lichen
or ledge moss and drops,
joining, to trickle,
5run, fall, dash,
sprawl in held deeps,
to rush shallows, spill
thin through heights,
but then, edging,
10to eddy aside, nothing
of all but nothing’s
curl of motion spent.
1978 (1980)
Augmentations in Early March
The grail trees this
morning are
ice-corseted to the least
twig and a breeze,
5sun-raised,
squeaks the got-up skeletons
limb against limb
with
music frazzled
multiple as mist
10settling or as treesful
of gritty grackles
on their way here now.
1980
Working Differentials
The mts,
their pushy
roundness,
force
5streams
to wind
but the streams
to wind less
take the
10roundness
away and
put it down
flat
where they
15though then
meander deeply
as if at
leisure or in
spite.
(1979)
Winter Sanctuaries
The squirrel, bunching branches,
knits a billowing raft
from twig-ends and, riding air, lifts
one paw to pull in a tip
5where maple seeds, shaken, cling.
Cold Spell
The sun seeps the evergreens’
long-wood shade
off the snow and the cut
of light deepens into ditchbanks;
_________
5hedgerows (gray clatter) trap
windy heat-holdings, and barns,