by A. R. Ammons
away away
Whitelash of Air Rapids
This bright morning, the
leaves hardly dipping,
it’s okay to be out
under trees, the elms
5and sugar maples deadwood
cleared by yesterday’s sucking
thundergusts when the leaves
turned on, lifting,
the high branches and maple
10and elm logs
floated plunging in
the lofts on sleeves and roils of air.
1982 (1985)
Late November
The white sun
like a moth
on a string
circles the southpole.
Leaning Up
The storm that downed
the living pine
left the dead hickory
standing:
5barkless, stub-knobbed,
den-hole riddled,
the hickory
will
be around while
10the heavy, heaving living
carry on carrying
nearly too much to bear alive.
1975
Twangs & Little Twists
The snow polished
hard after
day-melt,
the squirrel’s
5scratchy paws on
strict
ice sound like
my shoes’
scritchy squish.
Night Post
The philodendron’s ear-leaf
by the
_________
window
listens for the moon.
1975 (1986)
Late Look
The last one
died and she
shook with relief,
her house free
5from the threat of
sick old people
only to see in
the mirror an
old woman arriving.
Grove’s Way
The campus oakgrove is
something (specially now
with the elms gone)
the branchlofts subsuming vast
5congregations,
the trunks centuries through—
but a guy wire’s been run
to hold in one
tree on the edge being
10leaned out of the grove.
1977
Nearing Equinox
The boundaries, fought clear, are abandoned,
now, and the robins fly in bunches over
common ground: drift, return in near reversals,
but, on the whole, feed south—yew berries
5reddening, the honeysuckle berries dried up,
crickets, fall fat, singing all night.
Circling Splinters
Summer’s coming’s summer’s going:
only leaving brings returning:
things rise, stand, drown:
winter shows summer’s sticks
5and no summer comes
again when summer comes.
Squall Ball
Squalls rounder
than the sky exclude
the sun
till brightness
5like a loose thread
showing on the
west ridge unravels
hedgerows
and fields into light.
Teleology
Some things
are so
big that
it’s hard
5to tell
you’re going
round going
round them.
Negligence These Days
Somebody left a ladder
flat
on the university
grounds
5so the mower
couldn’t
get over it and
grass
and weeds filled
10its
intervals with spindly
ascendancy.
1985
Theory Center
Poetry if
not the
criticism of
life is
5the life
of criticism
Around Here
Our trees seem leaflesser
than anybody’s in January:
ice scum-wrinkles ponds
in arctic flashes:
5our clouds bollix sunny
forty-six ways:
our falls, dumb
columns at
fifteen below, purport
10perpetual motion.
Salute
May happiness
pursue you,
catch you
often, and,
_________
5should it
lose you,
be waiting
ahead, making
a clearing
10for you.
Grisly Grit
It’s so cold
the snow doesn’t
need clouds to
snow from: it
5fines right out
of the air,
humidity’s immediate sift,
and, nearly weightless,
settles as if against
10its will all over.
Close Relations
Islands dry out enlarging
on the
brook’s slate bottom
while the sky-shallows
5of lessening
pools
_________
shimmy
to
the feathery trickle.
Spring Clearing
I pull dead shafts
out of the spirea clump but
some branched rootknots,
split off,
5hook stuck:
I let them go another year:
decay will loosen them.
1981 (1986)
Resurrections
In spring
a bluster
busting up
against a
5wall will
lift last
year’s leaves
higher than
trees did.
Course Work
Ideas go
through most
heads without
picking up
_________
5any substance
or leaving
any trace
c. 1976 (1986)
Quit That
I don’t
want to
be taken
seriously except
5that I
want my
wish not
to be
taken seriously
10to be
taken seriously
Swoggled
I’d rather
be
suckled by
an
5outworn pagan
than
get my
horn
wreathed in
10an
old triton.
1986
Likely Story
I’d up
up up
if there
were any
5up to
up up.
Market Adviser
If you’re
not in
it for
the ups
5and downs
you might
as well
get out
of it
10she said
1984
Stills
I have nowhere
to go and
nowhere to go
_________
when I get
5back from there
Bulletin
I mentioned trimming
the bushes and
the squirrels cleared
their nuts out of there
The Upshot
It’s hard
to live
living it
<
br /> up down.
Milepost
I’ve been married
forty years and
in all that
time I haven’t
5been unfaithful once:
lately, I haven’t
even been faithful.
1979 (1986)
Coming Right Up
One can’t
have it
_________
both ways
and both
5ways is
the only
way I
want it.
Their Sex Life
One failure on
Top of another
(1986)
Kingpin
One fellow turns all
ladies into ladies
of waiting till
he would be served
5but when he would
be served he is (alas)
oft kept awaiting.
Kith
The de
on one
end of
decide doesn’t
5look like
the de
_________
on the
other end
Layabout
The early
bird catches
the worm
but I’d
5just as
soon be
late and
catch hell.
1985
Resolve
We must work
in the spirit
of unity and
cooperation; I’ll supply
5the unity and
you supply the
cooperation.
1988 (1989)
Cold Rheum
You can’t
tell what’s
snot from
what’s not
(1986)
Reorganization
High wind yesterday
snapped the top
off the big
pine by the
5golf course, leaving
a single bough,
once lowest, highest.
1979
Preexistence
Guided by
none the
snowflakes draw
crowfeet white
5in the
spruce boughs.
Permanence
Eyes shined
for life
by a
bright loss.
(1986)
Orchard
Art’s the
fruit of
_________
the trees
of pain
5that grow
in the
fields of
unspent life.
Lost and Found
Apostasy is such, if you doubt on,
You return by the road you set out on.
1962
Capture
After the long snow,
the sun strikes a winded-free
side of the car:
the air twenty, metal, though,
5takes up heat and
melt trickling down
freezes like mangrove
roots,
grounding the car still.
1974
GARBAGE (1993)
to the bacteria, tumblebugs, scavengers, wordsmiths—the transfigurers, restorers
1
Creepy little creepers are insinuatingly
curling up my spine (bringing the message)
saying, Boy!, are you writing that great poem
the world’s waiting for: don’t you know you
5have an unaccomplished mission unaccomplished;
someone somewhere may be at this very moment
dying for the lack of what W. C. Williams says
you could (or somebody could) be giving: yeah?
so, these little messengers say, what do you
10mean teaching school (teaching poetry and
poetry writing and wasting your time painting
sober little organic, meaningful pictures)
when values thought lost (but only scrambled into
disengagement) lie around demolished
15and centerless because you (that’s me, boy)
haven’t elaborated everything in everybody’s
face, yet: on the other hand (I say to myself,
receiving the messengers and cutting them down)
who has done anything or am I likely to do
20anything the world won’t twirl without: and
since SS’s enough money (I hope) to live
from now on on in elegance and simplicity—
_________
or, maybe, just simplicity—why shouldn’t I
at my age (63) concentrate on chucking the
25advancements and rehearsing the sweetnesses of
leisure, nonchalance, and small-time byways: couple
months ago, for example, I went all the way
from soy flakes (already roasted and pressed
and in need of an hour’s simmering boil
30to be cooked) all the way to soybeans, the
pure golden pearls themselves, 65¢ lb. dry: they
have to be soaked overnight in water and they
have to be boiled slowly for six hours—but
they’re welfare cheap, are a complete protein,
35more protein by weight than meat, more
calcium than milk, more lecithin than eggs,
and somewhere in there the oil that smoothes
stools, a great virtue: I need time and verve
to find out, now, about medicare/medicaid,
40national osteoporosis week, gadabout tours,
hearing loss, homesharing programs, and choosing
good nutrition! for starters! why should I
be trying to write my flattest poem, now, for
whom, not for myself, for others?, posh, as I
45have never said: Social Security can provide
the beans, soys enough: my house, paid for for
twenty years, is paid for: my young’un
is raised: nothing one can pay cash for seems
_________
very valuable: that reaches a high enough
50benchmark for me—high enough that I wouldn’t
know what to do with anything beyond that, no
place to house it, park it, dock it, let it drift
down to: elegance and simplicity: I wonder
if we need those celestial guidance systems
55striking mountaintops or if we need fuzzy
philosophy’s abstruse failed reasonings: isn’t
it simple and elegant enough to believe in
qualities, simplicity and elegance, pitch in a
little courage and generosity, a touch of
60commitment, enough asceticism to prevent
fattening: moderation: elegant and simple
moderation: trees defined themselves (into
various definitions) through a dynamics of
struggle (hey, is the palaver rapping, yet?)
65and so it is as if there were a genetic
recognition that a young tree would get up and
through only through taken space (parental
space not yielding at all, either) and, further:
so, trunks, accommodated to rising, to reaching
70the high light and deep water, were slender
and fast moving, and this was okay because
one good thing about dense competition is that
if one succeeds with it one is buttressed by
crowding competitors; that is, there was little
_________
75room for branches, and just a tuft of green
possibility at the forest’s roof: but, now,
I mean, take my yard maple—put out in the free
and open—has overgrown, its trunk
split down from a high fork: wind has
/>
80twisted off the biggest, bottom branch: there
was, in fact, hardly any crowding and competition,
