by A. R. Ammons
perceived the evidence, raked it
460up, sorted through it, the recurrent
from the fortuitous, meanwhile casting
out the merely repetitious, bundled
sortings up, clumped certain ones into
bags, tied strings around the bags,
465heaved the whole business up on your
shoulders and jostled around till
you’ve found the balance point in
it—what an amazement
as you stand there searching stillness,
470not yet having decided where to go
with it all, if anywhere, to realize
that the balance, the point of
balance, is a found piece of permanence
in the disposition of things (look how
475many of’s), a still place, primordial
form, and that every shiftless thing
it took to find
the point is mere change’s shifting
23
slice thirty degrees off the summer
480summit eighty and the windy ridge
that’s left can change your summer
clothes: it’s April and
glory is still uncertain and death
not:
485the air is so clear and the
sky fine blue this morning,
small showers having given
fringes to the front coming
through last night:
490a V of about forty geese, late,
and working nearly into the NW
wind, struggled through, haggling:
I’ve seen geese that waited early
for the right high wind go over
495like they were skating, the wings’
strokes covering apparent distances
(real distances, but not real air
distances) only gliding could acct for
24
last year we got this strawberry
500jar, a ceramic bulge-bellied vase with open
ears all around it and a strawberry plant
growing in each ear: winter came and I
put the affliction in the garage where
naturally the temperature fell below
505zero, though sometime during the day
the window found a ray that caught
the jar (not warming it much): the leaves,
cold-scorched quickly dead, remained green
all winter but when put out this
510spring turned burnt brown, you can just
imagine:
this story is too short for a long
story and too long for a short story:
anyway, today I observed two green serrated
515feelers oozing up into each of two ears
and thought to my self “my word”
the plants didn’t die: by then, that is
by this morning, since I had thought the
plants dead and stopped watering them,
520the jar was shrunk dry: so I went to
get the plastic wateringcan that has
been sitting all winter under the outside
faucet catching, since thaw, drops: leaks:
I noticed last fall’s leaves in the
525can and thought well that will improve
the juice but I thought it did smell
funny: I poured water into the jar-top
and most of it, drought-refused, ran over or
out: so I waited for the soak to take and
530began to think something really
smelled: I poured some more rich brown
juice into the jar and then upended
the can to let the leaves fall out and
out plunked this animal clothed in
535leaves so I couldn’t tell what he was
except his thick tail looked thicker
than a rat’s: mercy: I’d just had
lunch: squooshy ice cream: I nearly
unhad it: I expect the crows will come
540and peck it up, up, and away, the way
they do squirrels killed on the
streets: pulling at the long, small
intestines and getting a toehold on
small limbs to tear off the big flesh
25
545the rat was a mole: the arctic air
yesterday afternoon dried him out and
the freeze last night stiffened him much
reduced in size and scent: so
I broke out the shovel, dug up a
550spade, dumped in the mole: there let
him rot, the rat: I can see how
something blind could get into my
wateringcan: but with those feet!
I can hear him scratching up the side:
555to get in, or out: but also I can hear him
sloshing, the blind water darkened by
night, till nobody came
26
there is something about
a redbird flying down
560into
the brook bed, the stone-deep ditch,
and lighting on a washed-out root,
the brook meanwhile throwing mirrors
everywhere—light, mirror, bird, stone
27
565I like, as I have said before,
maximum implication and
registration of fact and tension before
integration catches on as to how
_________
it is to work and the point it
570catches on to the finish what a war
between what will and will not be
captured by design, bent to a larger
rule, made to serve, expand, elaborate:
it is not right until the design
575at once insists on itself and accommodates
itself to the material all the way out
to the tricky coincidental! for if
the central, controlling design will
not submit to the chippy alteration of
580the surprising appearance, the fortuitous
bit, its control will be perfect, a
nonplace, emptiness: but the integration
that tests itself, adjusting, sorting,
out to the limit why it holds because
585there is nothing to loosen it, garrisons
and amassings of questioning having
meanwhile overturned the perfect
28
it doesn’t matter to me if issues
overload a line:
590or if real poetry shrugs shucking
bugs of small intentions
off the shoulders of its purer
streams—what the fuck—everybody
has to eat, nature overfilling
595everything to fill it:
yesterday was one day, today is
another, tomorrow still one more:
the creeps:
the sun is bright but can never
600squint fine enough to count time
by my span:
it is unavailing: everyone knows
that when we die we wake up
elsewhere from the dream life into
605life, hop over a fence and
walk off across nobody’s pasture
29
I wake from a nap
in a room I have worked
so many hours and years
610in, made long poems &
dinky ones in, read and
answered letters and
thrown some out unread
or unsent and I cannot
615remember ever having been
here before, this place,
the woods
out the window, what does
it mean, and then I recall
620a trace, but nothing I
couldn’t throw away, and
that trace fits with a
recent time that blocks
out into fullness of
625being and then the walls
/>
settle, the house
takes disposition
with the street, the
town, oh, yes, the lake, ridges,
630I yawn a couple of times
and pick up the latest
thing to do
30
words cast up
to see if light
635will pick anything out in them
like sand and trash
a winnowing:
though I cast up true
words as far as I know
640(words that truly
occur) I cannot be
held wrong when I range
into winnowing chaff,
truly chaff: I am
645seeing: I am looking to make
arrangements: is the land
rich, are the children
well, the mind, is it
well-stocked and with what,
650fish: has a grain
of hope or grain been
found: is there, going
this way or that, any
increase in increase or
655any falling off: is, at
this time, any direction
worth finding: I said
the words in the time
of themselves: I said the
_________
660words as truly as I could
say them, according to
themselves: the words
are not responsible: they
are not the truth: they
665caught the swerve, they
revealed the glint: the
mind opens—it is so
delightful, glaring—many
times before it finds a
670room worth finding:
but chaff will show
you “which way the wind
blows” truly: my words
are, of course, chaff
675as assertions are:
but the motions: as
the wind blows, so blows
the world: in the
innerwork of the
680motions one reads what will
be aright and turns here or
there as he can (ashcan) to get
away or be there with it:
I speak to show not
685the substance but
the curvature of the going
the substance may change often
but the curvature has a glacial
pace, seeming, to tell the truth,
_________
690out of kilter with substance:
but probably, though we can’t
wait too long to see, it comes
out right eventually
31
I was this
695morning affrighted past loafing
by the small blood
lining the squirrel’s mouth
where he lay on the highway’s edge
his legs spraddled stiff into space
700the high eye full of the morning sun
the other
scrinching wide open on grainy macadam
oh, me, I said, myself affected, cars
are our worst predators
705getting more
than crows can hawk (hocking &
spitting) into shreds even
(though it’s good
that some things clear things away—
710in the old caves
dying men
shoved into backroom fissures, split trenches,
found quickened way to rigid ease)
a young couple bicycling came up the
715hill past the squirrel and though the
girl’s eyes cast it a slight shake
her talk didn’t break and they went on
by with the tribute of being glad to get
by:
the car itself, the kill recent, had
gone on, notifying no one—why notify,
or how, a different species: we never
tell mules we’re dead, though they say
Uncle Asa’s great-horned owl knew the
725afternoon, changing, he died because his
hooting skirled or whatever and he
wouldn’t stop moaning, the thriving
throat croak, and dogs out under the
lean-to’s of barns know when their
730masters lie dying
32
today Jerry, Fran, Phyllis and I went
to see the high farm out by Mecklenberg:
the farm starts high and keeps getting
higher: the brook runs way up and
735on the way is the low pond but further
up, the larger high pond and then
there are a couple of fields of
ascension and then the old woods of
the ridge, precipitous in climb, not
740available to hassling lumbermen:
along the ridge is a long march
you don’t have to sweat once you’re
there: wild turkey, deer, grouse
inhabit the inaccessibilities and make
745do: I would buy a whole 130-acre farm
for one hermit lark, his song,
especially his song at evening by a
pond: right now there are some shabby
sheep, eight cocks (henless): I heard
750one cock crow, a sound I’ve been as hungry
for as the lean throats of cockerels:
one dog, the master not around, three or four
scrubby cattle: an apple tree a hundred
years old looking better in spring
755leaf than the house a hundred years
old: it’s got so the only place you
can appreciate won’t appreciate: the
silence was ineluctable: I heard it
& heard it: it reminded me of the
760ground: noise is motion: silence
deepens down and picks up ground
boulders and deepens down to springwater
33
I’m split but not
in two, I bough
765into ramification,
I break out into
peripheries of leaf,
mist informs my
rondures: I go more
770than halfway one way
and crosslash back
away: my
splits overlace:
the complication
775strengthens me,
interweaving my
fragmentation, so
that I include
in a sweep of singleness
780as much singleness
as one needs and
more than enough
sweep
34
don’t think we don’t
785know one breaks
form open because he fears
its bearing in on him
(of what, the accusation,
the shape of his eros, error,
790his guilt he must buy
costing himself)
and one hugs form because
he fears dissolution, openness,
we know, we know:
795one needs stanzas to take
sharp interest in and
one interests the stanza
down the road to the wilderness:
life, life: because it is
800all one it must be divided
and because it is
divided it must be all one
35
wherever mortality sets up a net
or responsibility’s strictures harden
805I mount into a whirlwind and
buzz off, clearing a streak
I spend the night in sonnets but the
next morning pack my bag with free verse
the road is my winding song sheet
810the rivers, branches, brooks purl
my uneasy pleasures:
leaving everything behind, I stick to
nothing
I will not hear the te
rms of arraignment
815or appear in the marble courts
I will not bear the sophistry,
subtle ramification, of the arguments
for and against:
yet the guilt sharp as jails has gotten through:
820the air dissolves and absorbs,
oceans dissolve and absorb,
the imagination changes things
whose change, the hell of things, comforts me
36
straitened narrow, river-wound
825through the pass, bluff walls misty
with moss-like trees,
doing what is worth doing is worth
what doing it is worth
but doing what is not worth doing
830that can really be worth doing
often when one is denied access
to reality
imagination will rise to the occasion
and body
835forth the vivid thing as if itself
so the deprived
may be given all but touch of the
form, color, line
or will produce the very presence of
840the thingitself itself but with
shadowy reservation to please the mind
but not the solid body
lawn full of goldfinches eating
dandelion seeds, the headful whipped
845over, held by a perchfoot—the yellows
nearly interchangeable
37
everyone watches the world end once
or if one is asleep
the roots of his dreams loosen and
850brain soil crumbles down the slopes
or if a coma has risen right into the
shallowest waters of awareness
why then the world may as a skim of light end
38
I don’t care if I don’t tell the truth
855the she-spider hangs to the ceiling
of the backporch as if, dead since last
November, alive: by her hang five
egg sacs, waiting: the she-spider
flares there, dead and dry, guarding still:
860or I don’t care if I tell the truth
