by A. R. Ammons
the way the struck squirrel in his fifth
day by the roadside begins with perfect
accuracy to advertise his whereabouts: the truth
is none of my business: I don’t care if
865I tell a little: my business is to make
room for the truth, to bust the couplet,
warp the quatrain, explode the sonnet,
tear down the curvatures of the lengthy:
the truth is commodious, abundant: we
870must make a room so sufficient it will
include till nothing will be left
over for walls, merely the thinning away
to the numb, great vacancy visible
39
in the small walks & chasms
875of despair one seeks to find and
pretends to build enledgments to
plateaus of staying and view but
these unfound, pretended become high
lake surfaces of chagrin, false, of
880course, in themselves but,
worse, too brilliant for common use
40
the honeysucklebushes already weighty
with new leaf and blossoms can hardly
bear the most recent foliage, snow:
885the branches separate in the dome and
fall all ways, in the angle of falling
catchment for snow amply provided,
the bent bent, the bush crushed,
a great ground flower:
890the desert
mouse twitches under the rule of the
rattler flash or owl appearing unheard:
and
the rattler under the flare of the
895redhawk which destroys the head first,
plucking out eyes and tongue: how
worrisome the yew-snow to the
she-cardinal, all day yesterday,
Sunday, stirred from her nest by boys playing
900basketball, here this morning greeted by
another hassle: I hardly believe I don’t
have to teach this morning: the first
Monday off: snow, free to draw winter
lines in the stickwork of tree and bush
905inconvenienced inconveniences the midMay
boughs, so full and thin, catchy:
problem solvers subsidized with subsidies
and grants approach solutions but artists
dwell penniless with the central problem
41
910we were talking about our MFA program
(pogrom) in Creative Writing when I said
should we, can we, professionalize
delight
and what better way to point up need
915than by the superfluous
I said something like that, others
were saying other things, like why
not teach creative seeing or theory or the
voice of tone, or point-of-view
920what I said was disrespectfully inane
and consequently useful to those
needing an angle offsight to true
up against, the clearing into range
of a blur: by the time my blur had
925taken on the definition of balanced
variations and compromises it was
no longer delightful, and I turned
down everything clear, arranged for
small game: I do not care to hunt
930if I cannot be run over by
an elephant or flushed out of the bushes
by an inquisitive lion or buttressed
with speed from the rear by a forward
_________
waterbuffalo: I wouldn’t want to kill
935anything innocent unless it had
weaving in ranks before it a ridge of
cobras or dashing crocodiles: my
walking stick, I hope I said how it
makes me feel wooden about the
940shanks when I go walking and dogs zoom
out to brag on their teeth: but it is
the very thing to challenge a dog or
man to violence: and if a man snatched
it away, it would become his weapon,
945so effective and sufficient, against
me: what was said on this subject of
swords works for walkingsticks as well:
the moral nature of the North is such
it is considered indecent to be decent:
950united we stand, divided we sit down:
once a month about I put everything
away, stickeraserbrush, paper, drafts,
inks, watercolors, clips, everything
away, clean up my room and walking out
955declare, I am done with creativity,
only to discover the next day or hour
that everything cut down to
creativity everything goes with
that: I cut the grass, take up or
_________
960put in tulips, consider puttying up
the windowpanes, hack off some live or
dead branches here and there—but
come back to creativity and break
out all its gear again and set to
965doodling: thank the Lord: home is
where the doodle is: today cleared
so bright blue one felt the offer,
this is it, take it, and trying to
take it found no way to do so: today
970was a complete chance, a chance at the
complete, the adequate satisfaction:
how painful beauty is that gets away
full and unbesmirched and how comfortable
the rainy day that publishes your
975lesser failures: life is roundabout
and roundabout and we are, with ups
and downs, linear: the round goes on
but we break in and out: the squirrel
killed 11 days or so ago, chucked off
980the road by crow or cop, was chucked
back but right on the road’s edge,
by the man cutting his lawn: several
days were cold and nothing touched
the squirrel and then the snow filled
985his ear and tallied his tail out to
_________
the feather bone: so he
is doing pretty good but the old
killing is still sketched on his face
and one wishes for the warm days,
990the worms rising up under him and
draining him off into flight: I have
mourned him so many times I grow angry
at his self-ful staying on: disditches
42
minutiae is a fussy word
995matrix is too perfect
often is often mispronounced
irregular suggests constipation
irregardless is one of those things
mucous is the nastiest slick on la lange
1000I like strut as in strutted veins
varicose moleways
some people say they don’t like
thought flowing through illustrative
images (they can’t catch much)
1005they prefer to dwell in one place into
revelation unsuspected
everybody these days mixes up
lie and lay and mispronounces forehead
43
the high farm beseeches my mind,
1010thought, my mind soars up the hard
climb to the ridge but then
feels the backing of the ridge
to the sweep, the high passover
so laborious, everything under it
1015gentled, the still ponds, swallows
plinking them with fine lines, flies
spinning to burr shook into the surface
tension, nipper fish catching a
chink in the mirror informative as
1020a web: the earth is so fearful
; and beautiful! ticks, mites,
flukes, spilldiddlings from the
assholes of filthy sheep—O
troubled shepherds—
1025I love nature especially if there’s
a hospital nearby and macadam or
glass in between: or
the way it survives as cuttings
or seedlings in claypots or plastic
1030furrows cut off from the true ground: how
our forefathers hated woods and sex,
so much of both to deal with,
cut down or back: but now the
coonyus surrounded by taming
1035equations of the pill, the sperm
rage, such a wilderness, shot wild,
why we can horse deeply in with
irresponsibility’s ease: that’s what
they say: I’m afraid nature’s going
1040to send the bill: it usually does:
ferocious tallywhacker
44
sweeps of space haunt the slopes,
the ridge starved to the wind that
skins it: boulders like springs
1045spill winter’s coolth, residuals:
stones will not have warmed to summer
before frost cuts back: brook
stones cast shadows underwater,
deep in small falls’ flow holes:
1050upland marshes, flow-slows, in them
logs idle, fallen den trees, turtles
big and little angle up the ascents
and sun a chill that won’t come off
45
the thought that
1055so much is not wasted but is
the wellspring
of the tight usages we take
and spill! downridge from some spot
any way is ten miles, so much beneath
1060one one feels the invitational
unlidded, the not-held-down:
what smart fright! dive into the
fringes of houses on dirt roads, and
then paved narrow roads, and then
1065the main arteries, flowing a lot more
quickly, to the holding spleens of
towns by lakeshores low as you can get
46
culture, hardened to shellac’s empty
usage, defines in definitions
1070hoaxdoms of remove from the true life
which
is smaller, leaner than a brook, no
louder, variable as, to the true rain:
the true life feels about its small
1075shoulders the traces and burdens of
death and turns for relief to berries,
bushes bent in abundance,
to dives into fell pockets of streams,
to musings on the clean forward edging
1080of the moon, to the eye of the other,
consolation, what there is, in the small
humbling touch
47
peeling the bark off a crabapple
cane, the purplepink woodskin, I heard
1085the loud oriole overhead in the maple
(looking for worms, I bet—we don’t
have many this year, wonder why that
is, last year he could have opened
his mouth and a
1090bellyful would have crawled in, instead
he searched bough on bough, flying
and emitting scarves of music in
between, and never I think found a
thing)
1095worms ending in song
(except in the oriole’s case one would
just as soon they didn’t)
48
at dusk rabbits settle
out of the air and crop
1100the plumequill stems of blown dandelions
nibbling them up like drunk drinking straws
and then in the most delicate, short-range
leaps get over to the quince leaves
and trim the bush hind-leg high
49
1105little showers yesterday evening, quiet
as rabbits emerging into dusk to feed,
darkened the macadam except where
_________
overhanging shower-holding trees drew their
negatives in dry ground: but this morning,
1110fog has built up drops in the branches and dripped
wet images of trees on ground otherwise dry:
needles and leaves collect until
their points bulge to drop and then if
the wind riffles a small shower will erupt
1115and rustle: fellow said he was so weak he
couldn’t throw a shadow: maybe fog has
the multiplicity to deal with pollen, that
is, touch it in the air, grain to mist-drop,
and bring it down: but
1120on the first breeze that stirs
under a lifted fog, weavements and
shimmerings of pollen unlace
50
a light catches somewhere, finds human
spirit to burn on, shows its magic’s
1125glint lines, attracts, grows, rolls
back space and dark, stands dominant
high in the midsphere, and reality
goes into concordance or opposition, the
light already dealing with darkness
1130designating it darkness, opposition by
naming, and the intensity of the source
blinds out other light: reason
sings the rightness but can do nothing
to oppose the brilliance: it dwells:
1135it dwells and dwells: slowly the light,
its veracity unshaken, dies but moves
to find a place to break out elsewhere:
this light, tendance, neglect
is human concern working with
1140what is: one thing is hardly better
or worse than another: the
split hair of possible betterment makes
dedication reasonable and heroic:
the frail butterfly, a slightly
1145guided piece of trash, the wind takes
ten thousand miles
51
I like nature poetry
where the brooks are never dammed up or
damned to hauling dishwater or
1150scorched out of their bottoms by acids:
the deep en-leafing has now come and
the real brook in certain bends dwells, its
stone collections dry-capped, shale shelves
in shade, leaves and falls murmuring
1155each to the other—and yesterday I
looked upbrook from the highway and
there flew down midbend a catbird to
the skinny dip, found a secure
underwater brookstone and began, in a
1160dawnlike conclave of tranquility, to
ruffle and flutter, dipping into and
breaking the reflective surfaces with
mishmashes of tinkling circlets.
2: Tombstones
1
the chisel, chipping in,
finds names the
wind can’t blow away
2
it breaks the heart
5that stone holds
what time let go
but the stones are
the time left
that the names can be in
3
10the ground flat or,
rolling from a hill rise, slightly
shedding,
no downpour can
organize flows to displace
15the stones,
identifications tumbling
from one mound to another
4
set on the line between
time and abyss,
20at the intersection
of usual time ongoing
and a time stopped within
other times,
the time o
f protons and electrons
25going on as usual—a stone—
levels of existence
in existence, times
in time, one organization
gone still; otherwise,
30nothing appears lost
5
the spirit, though, invisible,
weightless is lost: its
winding kept the winding
going: but only
35winding when winding stops
disappears:
when one loses nothing one
loses everything
6
but why put a stone there:
40we put a stone there
too heavy to build or fence with,
having no mineral content of value,
weighty enough
to hold time down,
45a memorial, often without
recoverable recollection,
a deed to a million
facts, all missing
7
rivulets of scattering,
50corruption’s ways
of getting on with things,
rememberers unremembered,
still the name
will call together in the last
55time, the new time, in the new morning,
all the bits of information and,
the name said,
the form will come again—the distance
between named and name run
8
60dust’s shape in air
