by A. R. Ammons
Dusk Water
Looks like, the rain run off, the brook’s
pane-deep again and
over the flat shale-squares
hardly blurs to move:
5bushes overhang (small trout floating
leaf-still in hollows) but
I can see when
the catbird lights in, his skinny
feet cracking the mirror,
10and then follows so much
shattering and splinter-flicking! which
though when he
stops wet to look around,
melts back, all the rag
15beads and quivers and the small mist,
to double-bird fine glass.
1979 (1980)
Pet Panther
My attention is a wild
animal: it will if idle
make trouble where there
was no harm: it will
5sniff and scratch at the
breath’s sills:
it will wind itself tight
around the pulse
or, undistracted by
10verbal toys, pommel the
heart frantic: it will
pounce on a stalled riddle
and wrestle the mind numb:
attention, fierce animal,
15I cry, as it coughs in my
face, dislodges boulders
in my belly, lie down, be
still, have mercy, here
is song, coils of song, play
20it out, run with it.
1981
Singling & Doubling Together
My nature singing in me is your nature singing:
you have means to veer down, filter through,
and, coming in,
harden into vines that break back with leaves,
5so that when the wind stirs
I know you are there and I hear you in leafspeech,
though of course back into your heightenings I
can never follow: you are there beyond
tracings flesh can take,
10and farther away surrounding and informing the systems,
you are as if nothing, and
where you are least knowable I celebrate you most
or here most when near dusk the pheasant squawks and
lofts at a sharp angle to the roost cedar,
15I catch in the angle of that ascent,
in the justness of that event your pheasant nature,
and when dusk settles, the bushes creak and
snap in their natures with your creaking
and snapping nature: I catch the impact and turn
20it back: cut the grass and pick up branches
under the elm, rise to the several tendernesses
and griefs, and you will fail me only as from the still
of your great high otherness you fail all things,
somewhere to lift things up, if not those things again:
25even you risked all the way into the taking on of shape
and time fail and fail with me, as me,
and going hence with me know the going hence
and in the cries of that pain it is you crying and
you know of it and it is my pain, my tears, my loss—
30what but grace
have I to bear in every motion,
embracing or turning away, staggering or standing still,
while your settled kingdom sways in the distillations of light
and plunders down into the darkness with me
35and comes nowhere up again but changed into your
singing nature when I need sing my nature nevermore.
1973 (1982)
Motioning
My father did not
get a resolution
to his problems: he
was taken down
5from them: a
vessel broke
_________
in his brain, and
he lost half his
capability: he
10walked less and
asked no questions:
sense returned
to his eyes and
with one hand he held
15the other
up: that was
stopped when the
central
heart, of which there
20is only one,
ticked off: my
father, I could
tell, had
a lot of questions to
25ask: but all
motion was
removed from the matter.
Love’s Motions
The old woman, toothless
as an infant, rocked
back and forth slowly
on the cot, figuring
5outwardly the binds she
had come to, but smiled,
_________
hassling, at the son-in-law,
stuffed hard-fat in the
corner chair, his mouth
10breezy with superhighways,
tunnels, interchanges,
the grayed daughter
obviously concerned but
chipping in about the
15cloverleaves and the hard
kids left behind: the doctor
came in, sat down beside
the old woman, and took
her hand to count: she
20looked at him and calm
and new confidence came
over her: the doctor said,
“Here, try this walker”:
the old woman stood up and
25nudging forward held on with
both hands: “Look a there,”
she said, “wonder if
I’ll ever learn to walk.”
1977
Helping Hand
They told Miss Lou
it was her heart:
she said somehow I
_________
didn’t think it
5was my heart—
but went on
believing them when
the colon
was removed and
10while her skin sheered
several shades
of white
till they rushed her
pure white away for
15blood and then she
thought maybe it was her
heart for the pints
of sudden blood
troubled and stopped
20it: she
called help, help,
the assault crumbling,
sheets of dark warping
past her: hold me,
25she cried, not against
going down but
to steady her through.
Debris
Say something and then
question it nearly
out of existence: or split
_________
something cleanly down
5the middle, but make
one side as if
wrestle and beg for
the opposites and complements
of the other, the
10whole then standing
incredibly, a shambles
magnificently held up:
or drive a huge force of
argument through the
15parties’ exceptional manglings
till hardly a quibble
remains whole: let
the quibble speak.
Coming Round
Ships turn into lows
they can’t outrun,
the concision of the oncoming
a holding rightness, and
5tigers evade into threadlike
trails till
evasion snaps shut
then turn straight
to the bothering center:
10but I run on
_________
ruffling the periphery,
the treadmill’s outwheel,
declining center
or any loss of it
15and
no longer
crying help.
1972
Dismantlings
Snow holds two
feet deep on
top of the big
round yew,
5providing underneath
a dome for
cold-lean birds:
and even when,
the bush stirred
10by kicked-up
gusts,
the dome cracks
into floats,
showboats,
15the birds hang
around the slow
of the passing there.
Down Low
Snowstorms high-traveling,
furry clouds blur over
our zero air:
wind steams (or
5smokes) fine snow
off the eaves, settled ghosts
trailing up and away:
the pheasant, too cold to
peck, stands on one foot
10like a stiff weed.
We, We Ourselves
So nothing holds—
forget it, I already
knew it—or only
what turns and cleaves
5to itself and that
is no holding in
a larger sphere—and,
anyway, nothing not
broken holds, the other
10reaching across
the break to secure the missing
but at least one
hold might stay
if the other gave
15way, a temporary
illusion of holding
not altogether illusory—
but then literally
nothing holds—it
20does—under the
deepest fall the
rondure of the ultimate
sympathy, like
a symmetry,
25turns cupping in to
the levitating explosions,
of meetings, hallelujahs,
upward drafts
afterall
1981
Measuring Points
Squirrels in the early
spring ritual zoom, one
after the other,
winding round
5the trunk and up out
over the limbs, so fast
they keep the whole
tree bobbing for
minutes: they
10stop, scratch, and stop:
they get the tree as
still as their eyes.
1975
Section
The branch sags low
this morning with
held rain:
when the squirrel,
5traveling,
hits it it
dips deeply but,
shower and squirrel
lost, woofs back
10way higher than it
was, a risen road
righted thru trees—
a squirrel’s spent trail
1974
Buttermilk Falls
The falls slopes and a thousand
shale notches
and inch-ledge spills
mix the water white—
5so much speech of a kind,
so much to listen to,
differentials of tone and ruffle
a roiled continuum:
I sit down, draw a clear line
10to disinterested attention,
my white sheets &
markers out, and
begin to take it all down.
Spring Vacation
This snow’s
swayed and busted open
the fine-fingered
bushes,
5Lord, leaned over
break-neck spindly yews,
put mound
bloom on the spirea,
starved the pheasant
10fence-skinny,
_________
done us all
in with flu,
and’s still
coming down:
15clouds, sweep out:
sky, break up:
give us some way to get
to somewhere to go.
1974
Meeting Place
The water nearing the ledge leans down with
grooved speed at the spill then,
quickly groundless in air, bends
its flat bottom plates up for the circular
5but crashes into irregularities of lower
ledge, then breaks into the white
bluffs of warped lace in free fall that
breaking with acceleration against air
unweave billowing string-maze
10floats: then the splintery regathering
on the surface below where imbalances
form new currents to wind the water
away: the wind acts in these shapes, too,
and in many more, as the falls also does in
15many more, some actions haphazardly
_________
unfolding, some central and accountably
essential: are they, those actions,
indifferent, nevertheless
ancestral: when I call out to them
20as to flowing bones in my naked self, is my
address attribution’s burden and abuse: of course
not, they’re unchanged, unaffected: but have I
fouled their real nature for myself
by wrenching their
25meaning, if any, to destinations of my own
forming: by the gladness in the recognition
as I lean into the swerves and become
multiple and dull in the mists’ dreams, I know
instruction is underway, an
30answering is calling me, bidding me rise, or is
giving me figures visible to summon
the deep-lying fathers from myself,
the spirits, feelings howling, appearing there.
1981 (1982)
SUMERIAN VISTAS (1987)
for Phyllis & John
1: The Ridge Farm
1
The lean, far-reaching, hung-over sway
of the cedars this morning!
vexed by the wind and working tight
but the snow’s packed in, wet-set,
5and puffed solid: the cedars nod to
an average under gusts and blusters:
yesterday afternoon cleared the
sunset side of trees, the hemlocks
especially, limbering loose, but
10the morning side, the lee, sunless
again today, overbalances:
the grackles form long strings
of trying to sit still; they weight
down the wagging branchwork snow stuck
15branch to branch, tree to shrub,
imposing weeds
2
last night, the wind clunked
the icy heads of shrubs
against the house—
20long night of chunk-money spilling
3
a poet hands me his poem and says,
this is not my true voice, only a
line or so:
good, I say, but he is
25disappointed,
having found a self, if still reticent,
in himself he likes or would like to like:
but is his true
voice more interesting
30than the one in the poem and, anyway,
isn’t the one in the poem, if untrue,
truly untrue:
I know what he means:
he wants to write by the voice, to
35separate out the distinctive
in himself, a distinctive, and write to it:
that is not the way, the way
is to say what you have to say
and let the voice find itself
40assimilated from the many tones and sources, its
predominant and subsidiary motions
not cut away from the g
atherings:
but that is passive, he says:
no, I retort (for effect), it is passive
45to do the bidding of the voice you have
imagined formed: freedom engages,
or chooses not to, what in the world is
to be engaged
4
if nature could speak
50would it have something
to say right where it says nothing:
that is, be like me, reticent,
patient, waiting and slowly the
progressions will find progressive gears
55(even now backsteppings are being wound
forward) and the wind seek key other
than the eaves-key: nature would say,
be still, that is to say, indifferent
like me, only to say so would
60motion difference:
probably this is why nature says nothing—
it has nothing to say
5
knowledge, perception, this action
is so endless it might well be
65avoided, as one does not care to take
down just because it happens what happens, the play
of light on an inlet, bay, sea:
worked so far in, knowledge mingles
with its source
70so as to give up reefs, shoals, shores
of resistance, to unwind
the embracing curvatures of line,
shelf, lagoon
