by A. R. Ammons
tugging and tearing they
fall on our flat walls and poor
bushes: I wish we had left
the trees on this continent
10up, but then there would have
been too many wolves and timber
rattlers: still, the streams
would have been as constant
and clear as diamonds, and
15the wind probably would have
been as soft as bough sounds:
poor shrubs & bushes, scant
borders of ice-slick fields,
what a scraggly fringe you make
20against this stripped harrowing,
the naked wind, where once in
the cathedral of trees the
turrets would have stirred only
to bedazzle bits of
25sunlight on the prayer-still floor.
1982
Playback
After the inch-deep
snowfall around midnight
(spring arriving at
12:03) the clouds
5cleared out and the
clarion full moon
(full moon & equinox
coming together splitting
reality open)
10lit the lawn
brilliant, and the rabbits
romped under &
around the big spruce
(I saw it this morning)
15the clumps of prints
coming and going
& here and there entangling,
dispute for
territory or sexual rights,
20or love itself
irresponsible between two,
or the plain
evenness of fullness—
the moon, the balanced day
25and night, amplitude
for the emergence of
a time well taken.
1981
Positive Edges
As glimmer goes
off dusk
water
_________
the spirit frees
5itself from
shapes,
no gain to the
spirit world,
already filled, and
10no loss among the
shapes,
the subtraction netting
nothing, where
addition had lolloped
15all day,
splintered into white
spray or
flattened tremor-brilliant:
with one, play and
20plenty: with the other,
nothing missing.
1981
On Being
The one who wishes
to be
loves definition
that clearly announces
5to the other
things that are
shapely assertion
but the one
who cringes to be
_________
10what he is
twists wrestling
with the arrival
of hateful exactitude
and the clear
15pointing out
of limited difference
till throwing
away
the lines, halters,
20blinds of
dense body,
he throws away
the city, country,
earth itself
25and finds no
place to gentle
down till
(the soft land where
the jostle is slow
30and surmise hazy)
nothingness’s
wide amplitude
makes his place
1981
By the Boulder Cluster the Wind
By the boulder cluster the wind
struck up a dust-ghost,
a brothering shade and shadow,
and oh I said
5that I could live lively as you
and have
no more to die
and the ghost tore
into a shackling shrub
10and failed like sleet,
returning
shape’s interference
to clearing.
The dust rearranging
15to a new breeze
I gave up
the intermediate
paradise
and said so
20all things do from misty arisings
mistily depart,
shingling down
the rills and ruffles
of nothing-in-between.
1976 (1977)
Instancing
Foolish of course to spend
time with sticks &
rocks & spindly shifts
_________
of weeds, say things to them,
5and make them say things back:
glows hide
still to be named in human
faces, studied, tones speech
can’t surface responded to:
10but should one who has
no ticket to feasts be harmed
if he banquets on
a crumb or marvels a bit
of cheese into plenty: leave
15him to the coined riches
at least should one of those at
table lose his place and need
quick tips on dining on nothing alone.
1974
Trigger
I almost step on
a huge spider:
it stalls and
disperses
5like oil-beads on water,
baby spiders
shedding radially
till a skinny
mother hardly
10shades the
spent center.
Apologetics
I don’t amount to a thing, I said to the mountain:
I’m not worth a tuft of rubble: I come from
nothing, that’s where I’ll go: you take, like, from
my elevation, everything rises, slopes with huge
5shoulders barreling and breaking up as if out of
melt-deep ground: when I look out I don’t see
a scope falling away under prevailing views
into ridges, windings, plots, stream-fields: sir,
the mountain noticing me below and fixing
10me in view said, what you don’t have you nearly
acquire in the telling, there is a weaving
winding round in you lifting you buzzardlike up into
high-windings: just a minute, I said to the
mountain: exaggeration is not your prerogative:
15you have to settle for size: eminence is mine.
1975
Songlet
Death, unduly undoing,
kisses us awake into
the new world and leaves
us preempted and unsteady:
5oh, here we go, we say,
another adjustment as usual:
light appears to be the leader
here: we turn to where
a beam forms and set out
1981
Is the Only Enough None
If to my nuzzlings &
whimpers for meaning
rapids stopped to
break open their going—
5or if to my eyes’
rolling for filling
light the fringes of
lit clouds congealed
to gold or if
10my loose mind waited
by the glacier
for the core-stream
to shine in thaw—
I would be rather put
15out at getting things
right or rather when
meaningful and held
I finally considered
matters through, then
20motion’s shows might
recommence leaving my
hordes emptiness but
me, then, light enough
to get back in the act
1982
Giving Up Words with Words
Isn’t it time to let things be:
I don’t pick up the drafts-book,
I ease out of the typewriter room:
bumblebees’ wings swirl
5free of the fine-spun of words:
the brook blinks
a leaf down-bed, shadow mingling,
tumbling with the leaf, with no
help from me: do things let alone
10go to pieces: is rescue written
already into the motions of coherence:
have words all along
imitated work better done undone:
one thinks not ruthlessly to bestir again:
15one eases off harsh attentions
to watch the dew dry, the squirrel stand
(white belly prairie-dog erect)
the mayfly cling daylong to the doorscreen.
1981
Settling Up
I think my
light won’t
slow down
to matter,
5my wind be
air to any
thicket,
my stream bend
round
10to any dam
and yet light,
wind, stream
help me
find
15the eyes in whose
library I
read lasting scriptures
1975
Negative Pluses
One whose impulses are
received, encouraged
by the world finds
a place to put down cool,
5settle: one who when
he touches down feels the
burn of difference,
exclusion must
like a hoped-for fusion
10system
suspend his reactions
midair: this involves
centering radially
many sides, a skinless air mass
15that drops down
and bounds up again
risking loops
gravity might not recover from:
one in this wise
20develops rotundity of preparation
and defense, an undue
awareness of transience,
and a sense of place complex
enough to represent reality
25and simple enough
to be profoundly clear.
1979 (1980)
Yadkin Picnic
for Jane and Pat Kelly
It takes so long to set up the terminological landscape,
a rise of assimilation here, wooded underpinnings
fringed by thickets of possibility there, and throughout
in a slope, an undulation falling away to one side, an
5old river’s work—before one can say, “May we sweetly
kiss” or “Mark, the woodlark”—: begins with an airy
nothingness lofted, on one arc of which is a great sea and in
the middle of the sea an island, in the middle of which
a city, and mid-city a spire, the coming to point
10of the tallest assumption: after this, it follows
naturally to say, “Yesterday, after the morning clouds, we
packed lunch and went over to picnic in Aunt Polly’s orchard.”
1975 (1982)
Laces
I’ve been around
practically anything
you can mention
(twice)
5and spring, elation’s
bump, has come
more than once:
seed
cut loose from the elm’s
10windy height have grown
elms elsewhere:
ends have tied and untied
but the knot of ourselves
unwinds once
1977
The Only Way Around Is Through
I’ve lost my ambition to be somebody:
what is there to be except
free of the need to be somebody:
the brook doesn’t save itself: slate
5honings, root wear, underminings,
silt-flow slopes
express to the sweetest reader former
times and ways but
the brook isn’t trying mainly to stay recalled:
10enough remains, bits, bunches, not to
take currency out of change: but
the brook’s glassy noise this
evening (jay and robin fighting dominion
out in a bankside crabapple bush)
15feels like its oldest recollection, the song
brassy, ledge-displaced, ledge-displayed
rattle-rush hard to find anything to to
repeat yet always the same: trying to
_________
write free of writing keeps me
20at it, writing my brook, not
to keep but to mumble by with.
1978
Old Desire
I wake up around three or four these mornings
and lie awake
in a region fine as a door ajar between
sleep and waking
5and burn cold about death, near and unfamiliar,
first for half an hour,
and then burn for fifteen minutes over the
clowning that was the day past:
burning turns to desire, the
10thrashing, and my passions,
late-polished, light up memories of
old passions also bright and, though spent, still
not spent
and then, fire considered into coals,
15I drift at length into furrows of doze and
wake to light coming, geese calling—
but this morning I saw on my walk
a squeaky bunch of tiny birds
light out, high leaping, into the high northwind,
20from one tree
and fly (swerving, bounding) half a mile of air
a hundred yards to the next reef of boughs:
so much for me for ever springing
out and touching down in desire again.
Making Room
I will not have
what I desire
for that
would unwind me,
5but not to have
what I desire
is a near
unwinding:
I move
10then
in a deserted
edge
till the abundance I
desire,
15starved out, becomes
this abundant space
Exchangers
The spruce bough looks so cold
and stiff and then the creaking
wind picks up as if to dash
motion into splinters and
5smithereens: the crows, addled
with no place to put down, lurch
_________
at least from branch to branch,
spilling some snow, or surge
deeply down to cast off into
10flight, burdens of snow then
coming undone, the
branch whipping up flexible
again into loadlessness,
black crow-weight to be borne any time
15for such springy reprieves from white
1972
Lips Twisted with Thirst
Lips twisted with thirst
in the hot country
I came to the glacial stream
and drank earnestly
5as men frame desire
and said
what reservoir, bowl then
lifted by sphinx-implicit stone
to the falcon air
10has the soul from drought
I took off the garment of flesh
unhinged the beams of my liquid day
and watched my desert-precious being
swim, wily as snake-water in the sand
15Unused to winds
liberated to rejected light
the soul cowered in its final sheath of wings
and turning from the naked dignity
and cracking drought
20I spoke in the presence of it
Tree cones and clouds
retold the unknown tongue
and heralds from the sun came
bearing my message
25to my scrawny soul
1953
The Eclipse Goes by Drawing
The eclipse goes by drawing
the moon-blood out
cleansing our shadow
from too much
5familiarity so
let us resolve to make an affirmation
casually at first but then
going a long way about
so that arriving we shall not know
10how to return:
you sit as in rain
one arm across the knees
and the other falling with a nut
to the squirrel
15and you stand naked with a bow
full in sunlight
one hound leaping perhaps and
you try
to be leafy
20while these two
below
will be conversant but
with only a little motion:
surely when we have brought this off
25and settled down for usual
no one will
be ruthless
and shrug out of it.
1953
