by A. R. Ammons
fences stall the perpendicular:
even the fretwork of
old vines, too skinny for snow,
10radiates a filigree
of the caught let go and
zero gives up by noon to one.
Hollows
The whirlwind lifts
sand into itself to hide
holy spun emptiness or to
erect a tall announcement
5where formed
emptiness is to be found.
1976
Volitions
The wind turned
me round and
round all day, so
cold it planed
5me, quick it
polished me
down: a spindle
by dusk,
too lean to
10bear the open dark,
_________
I said, sky,
drive me
into the
ground here,
15still me with the ground.
1976 (1979)
Providence
To stay
bright as
if just
thought of
5earth requires
only that
nothing stay
1974 (1974)
Going Without Saying
What to make of a breeze—
a spruce bough in
large measure nods:
maple leaves flicker
5or break (go) out with
sparse wobbles: poplars
as in shivering loft
shake flip-side bright
and rattle glistering
10mix’s wind and light:
willow sheathes seep the air
unjangling through.
1979
Devastation
When possibility fell
from many to one
to none
the place I stood in widened:
5but the Way I
thought is without extent
and can empty emptiness
emptier
and fill earth and sky
10with the abundance of
its absence and stand beside
me, a neighbor.
1979
Merchandise
When we have
played with
the toy life
death takes it
5back without
condition
whatever the condition
Pairing
Wish is a closer
rightness
than reason which
wish
5tosses into careful
resistances to
be obtained:
but when
wish is not to be
10wished
reason like a
failed mate
roams the woods
of the self
15whining for the
lost one
1972 (1975)
Rivulose
You think the ridge hills flowing, breaking
with ups and downs will, though,
building constancy into the black foreground
for each sunset, hold on to you, if dreams
5wander, give reality recurrence enough to keep
an image clear, but then you realize, time
_________
going on, that time’s residual like the last
ice age’s cool still in the rocks, averaged
maybe with the cool of the age before, that
10not only are you not being held onto but where
else could time do so well without you,
what is your time where so much time is saved?
1978 (1984)
LAKE EFFECT COUNTRY (1983)
for Edwin G. Wilson friend’s friend
The Bright Side
Bliss is the
trace of
existence that
persists in
5the idea of
nothingness—
thinking
nothingness
is a presence
10fragile as
the longing look
through
tragedy, the
frail whirl
15the mind climbs
(the defense
against
absolute beginnings
or endings)
20the inward-turning
edge of
the outermost,
the light that sets
in the utterly empty eye.
1981
Zero and Then Some
We would not want to persuade ourselves
on eternity with an insistence of
our own, pre-empting narrowly or
warping out of centrality the nature of what is—
5nevertheless we would not want to miss a
right praising, even if we had to reduce
the praise from substance and stand empty
in stance alone, an attitude merely or
willingness that would at least shirk
10indifference in wanting not to avoid praise:
whatever forever is we would not want to be
unconjoined with it or only in the ways
the temporal and particular necessarily
fall short of staying put: there is
15an ongoing we nearly cheapen by being its
specific crest, but humbly we know too it
bore us and will support us into whatever
rest remains: what if the infinite
filters through here ordinary as if it
20were just taking place locally? that is,
though the infinite is quite impressive
it may be like a weak gravity field, the
least spectacular thing around, the
immediate’s most trifling ingredient: we
25probably couldn’t detect it to redress or
address it, amass it to praise it, not with
regular human instrumentation: but addle
_________
us enough, we will drop the whole
subject and invent for substitution “that
30which is to be praised” and invest it with
our store of verve, no matter: the jay
will sometimes at dawn sit in the blue spruce
as if too blank to stir first and
piddle idly in song like a swinging
35squeak or singing wheel: it could be praise
though how it works or why it’s sung, we guess.
1981
Localizing
The ground that life’s unpredictability
dissolves is possibility’s very furrow,
the frail white root letting down
or unfolding into mix’s raw mush, loam:
5the doubleness, not necessarily two things
but of one thing being two: the pivot that
could skew either way: imbalance, though,
balances imbalance, there’s a pure category,
and new rudeness ameliorates old ruin:
10God’s will (the Way) everybody knows holds
grave assimilations of constancy in change,
that constancy though probably too high out
of things for any but undifferentiated effect:
and then the effect is as if from underneath!
15well, it’s nice to know that even
broaching error you may get something right,
or that not knowing sometimes finds a
better than known road, although in the
_________
long run everything wilts down and withers
20over, undone as beached seaweed: if we step
forward, it is into the shambles of our
time to come; and whether we step forward
or not, we are forwarded daily to a sparer
dimension, lessened mansion: but surely
25there is a Will
so high change can’t stir
it nor loss nor gain stagger it, spirit
unshadowed and shadowless! but we love it here!
1981
Theories of Height
Scaling the tiers of dominance,
one obliterates categories,
level by shrinking level,
till one,
5in the highest golden room,
turns about alone,
floating, disconnected, all
the world won,
perished beneath one’s sight, no equal to
10be addressed by and no
one to address: whereas, the meek,
in this
case the emotion wherever it
abide and the people,
15do, indeed, with no fights,
inherit
the earth, the whole
range, the humblest
sweets and asides,
20and the only solid view of height.
1982
The Spiral Rag
Opposites attracting could easing jar to a standstill
or unmoderated blast into mutual annihilation’s O; or,
just at the meeting node, veer around each other,
the momentum transforming into spin which would, of
5course, generate a whirlpool flow-through, so that the
energies undemolished and still current could find a
place where, slowed, they could give up their terrible
shapes and tendencies and dissipate into the continuum
from which they might eventually return: anyway, the
10circle won’t do, except as an infinitely extensible outer
boundary: also, the sphere won’t do, for some reason
I’ve forgotten (no transfusing discharge) just surface
extension with only surface flow: but the vortex will
come close to doing because it gives a standing-motion
15shape at the central interior so that high formations
finding each other have a way to go: the truest motion’s
truest shape’s the spiral’s inward arc, the inward
turning whirl that promotes a direction for the
meeting that can wear down or fly apart somewhere past
20the tightening screw’s whirl: whatever, what
a mechanism for averting, for taking in, changing, and
giving out, for holding still while the motion flies!
the mind figures but even though it wants to do well
never comes up with the source of what it comes up with.
1980 (1980)
The Fairly High Assimilation Rag
Plato derives the many from the one and Aristotle
the one from the many, and these two together give
the flip-flop sides of a dynamics too
one and two for easy entry or exit: parallel with
5that philosophical goes the religious, in which
the One devolves and assuages into the fiats and
specifications of specialized deities, into polytheism,
and in which the many accumulate up, dissolving
their intense boundaries into the blurs and glows
10and finally on up of course to the absolute absence
and clarity of the total presence, One unspeakable,
monotheism: answering back and forth with heat
exchangers and mitochondria and other particulars in
and out of focus is the hierarchy, the one:many
15mechanism we everywhere seek and renounce: like
a mobile in which the wires are, though the only
means of support, hardly visible and where the bright
parts at liberty to play seem to be the reason for it all—
like that we seek the rigorous, tense, thin dispositions
20that allow the colorful personal feelings of free,
unoriented, singular family, all the way to the play
out of each his individual set of bones and wishes:
oh yes: the one:many’s the metaphysical (and discrete)
wherein we entertain systems high and low, sharp and
25fuzzy, radiant and drained, pertaining to most anything:
still, we don’t look to the wiring for immediate
help or hope as often as to the family vacations,
_________
and we are hurt by nothing so much as children’s
chances, their terrible uprisings and misleading
30procedures: society will wind and unwind but we may
or may not have a nice weekend depending on whether
or not we have been divorced or have enough booze
to last through Sunday: the particulars are so
close they are nobody else’s business (largely)
35whereas everybody does a little for the hierarchy
without which we would not know which way to turn.
1980 (1980)
I Could Not Be Here At All
Momentous and trivial, I
walk along the lake cliff
and look north where the lake
curls to a wisp through the hills
5and say as if to the lake,
I’m here, too,
and to the winter storm centered
gnarl-black over the west bank,
I nearly call out, it’s me, I’m here:
10the wind-fined
snow nicks
my face, mists my lashes
and the sun, not dwindling me, goes
on down behind the storm and the reed
15withes’ wind doesn’t whistle, brother! brother!
and no person comes.
1981
Written Water
I hope I will go through
the period of hunger
for immortality and be sated—
so that I can rise
5at last from that death into communion with
things, the flowing free of
grave trenches in rain, the
indifferent and suitable toppling
of stones, the wiping out of
10borders and prints, stains, inks;
so that I can abide the
rinse of change as the fountainhead’s
coolest, freshest drink, the
immortality likeliest to last, the clarity
15whose clarion no decay smuts,
change’s pure arising in constant souls
1981
Retiring
I’ll keep the brook watched,
the crinkles of light
between flow-stones
bundled into sheaves:
5I’ll sort the clouds into
categories between
the great names—
nimbostratus, cirrocumulus—
till so many fine distinctions
10become clouds again:
I’ll probably get the sun
up and down, turn
the stars through the round
sprinkling sheets, become essential
15at all the wind’s swerves,
keeping it going right.
1981
Nature Poetry
If no one sends you
messages to read, none
you can read
(so you have no
5replies to shape)
still you may irrelevantly read
messages sent to
no one, light shaking
off a poplar leaf
10(like seen wind chipped free)
or breaking into
threads
of bright-backed water
in brookstone shallows:
15these
messages, though
not sent to you and
requiring no response
may nevertheless be
20taken
down in strict
observances (like studied regard)
as if to be nearly adequate
&nb
sp; messages to no one.
1981 (1982)
Holding Still
A whirlwind held still
in the sideyard this
afternoon
a minute, three
5or four of last
year’s leaves,
one split and one
with a lobe ripped off,
caught up:
10I thought the leaves
at first astonishing
butterflies, hardly
enough figures there to
point a whirlwind’s
15center and
traveling: but soon
the structure broke
away, its currents
wobbling
20out of the wound-up winding:
the leaves scooted
up remnant loops
and fell out randomly
about, still—
25the eye of the hop-wobbly
baby rabbit, crouched
nearby under the small
pine, still, with a
whirlwind in it.
1975
Windy Morning with a Little Sleet
The roar of the wind coming
gets here before the wind
doing sixty does and the airy
billows sizzling fry rolling
5uphill from the lake till
