by A. R. Ammons
and the fat tree, unable to stop pouring it on,
overfed and overgrew and, now, again, its skin’s
broken into and disease may find it and bores
85of one kind or another, and fungus: it just
goes to show you: moderation imposed is better
than no moderation at all: we tie into the
lives of those we love and our lives, then, go
as theirs go; their pain we can’t shake off;
90their choices, often harming to themselves,
pour through our agitated sleep, swirl up as
no-nos in our dreams; we rise several times
in a night to walk about; we rise in the morning
to a crusty world headed nowhere, doorless:
95our chests burn with anxiety and a river of
anguish defines rapids and straits in the pit of
our stomachs: how can we intercede and not
interfere: how can our love move more surroundingly,
convincingly than our premonitory advice
2
100garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual, believable enough
to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and
creamy white: what else deflects us from the
105errors of our illusionary ways, not a temptation
to trashlessness, that is too far off, and,
anyway, unimaginable, unrealistic: I’m a
hole puncher or hole plugger: stick a finger
in the dame (dam, damn, dike), hold back the issue
110of creativity’s flood, the forthcoming, futuristic,
the origins feeding trash: down by I-95 in
Florida where flatland’s ocean- and gulf-flat,
mounds of disposal rise (for if you dug
something up to make room for something to put
115in, what about the something dug up, as with graves:)
the garbage trucks crawl as if in obeisance,
as if up ziggurats toward the high places gulls
and garbage keep alive, offerings to the gods
of garbage, of retribution, of realistic
120expectation, the deities of unpleasant
necessities: refined, young earthworms,
drowned up in macadam pools by spring rains, moisten
out white in a day or so and, round spots,
_________
look like sputum or creamy-rich, broken-up cold
125clams: if this is not the best poem of the
century, can it be about the worst poem of the
century: it comes, at least, toward the end,
so a long tracing of bad stuff can swell
under its measure: but there on the heights
130a small smoke wafts the sacrificial bounty
day and night to layer the sky brown, shut us
in as into a lidded kettle, the everlasting
flame these acres-deep of tendance keep: a
free offering of a crippled plastic chair:
135a played-out sports outfit: a hill-myna
print stained with jelly: how to write this
poem, should it be short, a small popping of
duplexes, or long, hunting wide, coming home
late, losing the trail and recovering it:
140should it act itself out, illustrations,
examples, colors, clothes or intensify
reductively into statement, bones any corpus
would do to surround, or should it be nothing
at all unless it finds itself: the poem,
145which is about the pre-socratic idea of the
dispositional axis from stone to wind, wind
to stone (with my elaborations, if any)
is complete before it begins, so I needn’t
myself hurry into brevity, though a weary reader
_________
150might briefly be done: the axis will be clear
enough daubed here and there with a little ink
or fined out into every shade and form of its
revelation: this is a scientific poem,
asserting that nature models values, that we
155have invented little (copied), reflections of
possibilities already here, this where we came
to and how we came: a priestly director behind the
black-chuffing dozer leans the gleanings and
reads the birds, millions of loners circling
160a common height, alighting to the meaty streaks
and puffy muffins (puffins?): there is a mound,
too, in the poet’s mind dead language is hauled
off to and burned down on, the energy held and
shaped into new turns and clusters, the mind
165strengthened by what it strengthens: for
where but in the very asshole of comedown is
redemption: as where but brought low, where
but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we
discern the savage afflictions that turn us around:
170where but in the arrangements love crawls us
through, not a thing left in our self-display
unhumiliated, do we find the sweet seed of
new routes: but we are natural: nature, not
we, gave rise to us: we are not, though, though
175natural, divorced from higher, finer configurations:
_________
tissues and holograms of energy circulate in
us and seek and find representations of themselves
outside us, so that we can participate in
celebrations high and know reaches of feeling
180and sight and thought that penetrate (really
penetrate) far, far beyond these our wet cells,
right on up past our stories, the planets, moons,
and other bodies locally to the other end of
the pole where matter’s forms diffuse and
185energy loses all means to express itself except
as spirit, there, oh, yes, in the abiding where
mind but nothing else abides, the eternal,
until it turns into another pear or sunfish,
that momentary glint in the fisheye having
190been there so long, coming and going, it’s
eternity’s glint: it all wraps back round,
into and out of form, palpable and impalpable,
and in one phase, the one of grief and love,
we know the other, where everlastingness comes to
195sway, okay and smooth: the heaven we mostly
want, though, is this jet-hoveled hell back,
heaven’s daunting asshole: one must write and
rewrite till one writes it right: if I’m in
touch, she said, then I’ve got an edge: what
200the hell kind of talk is that: I can’t believe
I’m merely an old person: whose mother is dead,
_________
whose father is gone and many of whose
friends and associates have wended away to the
ground, which is only heavy wind, or to ashes,
205a lighter breeze: but it was all quite frankly
to be expected and not looked forward to: even
old trees, I remember some of them, where they
used to stand: pictures taken by some of them:
and old dogs, specially one imperial black one,
210quad dogs with their hierarchies (another archie)
one succeeding another, the barking and romping
sliding away like slides from a projector: what
were they then that are what they are now:
3
toxic waste, poison air, beach goo, eroded
215roads draw nations together, whereas magnanimous
platitude and sweet semblance ease each nation
back into it
s comfort or despair: global crises
promote internationalist gettings-together,
problems the best procedure, whether they be in the
220poet warps whose energy must be found and let
work or in the high windings of sulfur dioxide:
I say to my writing students—prize your flaws,
defects, behold your accidents, engage your
negative criticisms—these are the materials
225of your ongoing—from these places you imagine,
_________
find, or make the ways back to all of us, the figure,
keeping the aberrant periphery worked
clear so the central current may shift or slow
or rouse adjusting to the necessary dynamic:
230in our error the defining energies of cure
errancy finds: suffering otherwises: but
no use to linger over beauty or simple effect:
this is just a poem with a job to do: and that
is to declare, however roundabout, sideways,
235or meanderingly (or in those ways) the perfect
scientific and materialistic notion of the
spindle of energy: when energy is gross,
rocklike, it resembles the gross, and when
fine it mists away into mystical refinements,
240sometimes passes right out of material
recognizability and becomes, what?, motion,
spirit, all forms translated into energy, as at
the bottom of Dante’s hell all motion is
translated into form: so, in value systems,
245physical systems, artistic systems, always this
same disposition from the heavy to the light,
and then the returns from the light downward
to the staid gross: stone to wind, wind to
stone: there is no need for “outside,” hegemonic
250derivations of value: nothing need be invented
or imposed: the aesthetic, scientific, moral
_________
are organized like a muff along this spindle,
might as well relax: thus, the job done, the
mind having found its way through and marked
255out the course, the intellect can be put by:
one can turn to tongue, crotch, boob, navel,
armpit, rock, slit, roseate rearend and
consider the perfumeries of slick exchange,
heaving breath, slouchy mouth, the mixed
260means by which we stay attentive and keep to
the round of our ongoing: you wake up thrown
away and accommodation becomes the name of your
game: getting back, back into the structure
of protection, caring, warmth, numbers: one
265and many, singles and groups, dissensions and
cooperations, takings and givings—the dynamic
of survival, still the same: but why thrown
out in the first place: because while the
prodigal stamps off and returns, the father goes
270from iron directives that drove the son away
to rejoicing tears at his return: the safe
world of community, not safe, still needs
feelers sent out to test the environment, to
bring back news or no news; the central
275mover, the huge river, needs, too, to bend,
and the son sent away is doubly welcomed home:
we deprive ourselves of, renounce, safety to seek
_________
greater safety: but if we furnish a divine
sanction or theology to the disposition, we
280must not think when the divine sanction shifts
that there is any alteration in the disposition:
the new’s an angle of emphasis on the old:
new religions are surfaces, beliefs the shadows
of images trying to construe what needs no
285belief: only born die, and if something is
born or new, then that is not it, that is not
the it: the it is the indifference of all the
differences, the nothingness of all the poised
somethings, the finest issue of energy in which
290boulders and dead stars float: for what
if it were otherwise and the it turned out to
be something, damning and demanding, strict and
fierce, preventing and seizing: what range of
choice would be given up then and what value
295could our partial, remnant choices acquire then:
with a high whine the garbage trucks slowly
circling the pyramid rising intone the morning
and atop the mound’s plateau birds circling
hear and roil alive in winklings of wings
300denser than windy forest shelves: and meanwhile
a truck already arrived spills its goods from
the back hatch and the birds as in a single computer-formed
net plunge in celebration, hallelujahs
_________
of rejoicing: the driver gets out of his truck
305and wanders over to the cliff on the spill and
looks off from the high point into the rosy-fine
rising of day, the air pure, the wings of the
birds white and clean as angel-food cake: holy, holy,
holy, the driver cries and flicks his cigarette
310in a spiritual swoop that floats and floats before
it touches ground: here, the driver knows,
where the consummations gather, where the disposal
flows out of form, where the last translations
cast away their immutable bits and scraps,
315flits of steel, shivers of bottle and tumbler,
here is the gateway to beginning, here the portal
of renewing change, the birdshit, even, melding
enrichingly in with debris, a loam for the roots
of placenta: oh, nature, the man on the edge
320of the cardboard-laced cliff exclaims, that there
could be a straightaway from the toxic past into
the fusion-lit reaches of a coming time! our
sins are so many, here heaped, shapes given to
false matter, hamburger meat left out
4
325scientists plunge into matter looking for the
matter but the matter lessens and, looked too
far into, expands away: it was insubstantial all
along; that is, boulders bestir; they
_________
are “alive” with motion and space: there is a
330riddling reality where real hands grasp each
other in the muff but toward both extremes the
reality wears out, wears thin, becomes a reality
“realityless”: this is satisfactory, providing
permanent movement and staying, providing the
335stratum essential with an essential air, the
poles thick and thin, the middles, at interchange:
the spreader rakes a furrow open and lights a
drying edge: a priestly plume rises, a signal, smoke
like flies intermediating between orange peel
340and buzzing blur: is a poem about garbage garbage
or will this abstract, hollow junk seem beautiful
and necessary as just another offering to the
high assimilations: (that means up on top where
the smoke is; the incinerations of sin,
345corruption, misconstruction pass through the
purification of flame:) old deck chairs,
crippled aluminum lawn chairs, lemon crates
with busted slats or hinges, strollers with
whacking or spinningly idle wheels: stub ends
350of hotdogs: clumps go out; rain sulls deep
coals; wind slams flickers so flat they lose
t
he upstanding of updraft and stifle to white
lingo—but oh, oh, in a sense, and in an
intention, the burning’s forever, O eternal
_________
355flame, principle of the universe, without which
mere heaviness and gray rust prevail: dance
peopling the centers and distances, the faraway
galactic slurs even, luminescences, plasmas,
those burns, the same principle: but here on
360the heights, terns and flies avoid the closest
precincts of flame, the terrifying transformations,
the disappearances of anything of interest,
morsel, gobbet, trace of maple syrop, fat
