by A. R. Ammons
worm: addling intensity at the center
365where only special clothes and designated
offices allay the risk, the pure center: but
down, down on the lowest appropinquations, the
laborsome, loaded vessels whine like sails in
too much wind up the long ledges, the whines
370a harmony, singing away the end of the world
or spelling it in, a monstrous surrounding of
gathering—the putrid, the castoff, the used,
the mucked up—all arriving for final assessment,
for the toting up in tonnage, the separations
375of wet and dry, returnable and gone for good:
the sanctifications, the burn-throughs, ash free
merely a permanent twang of light, a dwelling
music, remaining: how to be blessed are mechanisms,
procedures that carry such changes! the
380garbage spreader gets off his bulldozer and
_________
approaches the fire: he stares into it as into
eternity, the burning edge of beginning and
ending, the catalyst of going and becoming,
and all thoughts of his paycheck and beerbelly,
385even all thoughts of his house and family and
the long way he has come to be worthy of his
watch, fall away, and he stands in the presence
of the momentarily everlasting, the air about
him sacrosanct, purged of the crawling vines
390and dense vegetation of desire, nothing between
perception and consequence here: the arctic
terns move away from the still machine and
light strikes their wings in round, a fluttering,
a whirling rose of wings, and it seems that
395terns’ slender wings and finely-tipped
tails look so airy and yet so capable that they
must have been designed after angels or angels
after them: the lizard family produced man in
the winged air! man as what he might be or might
400have been, neuter, guileless, a feathery hymn:
the bulldozer man picks up a red bottle that
turns purple and green in the light and pours
out a few drops of stale wine, and yellowjackets
burr in the bottle, sung drunk, the singing
405not even puzzled when he tosses the bottle way
down the slopes, the still air being flown in
_________
in the bottle even as the bottle dives through
the air! the bulldozer man thinks about that
and concludes that everything is marvelous, what
410he should conclude and what everything is: on
the deepdown slopes, he realizes, the light
inside the bottle will, over the weeks, change
the yellowjackets, unharmed, having left lost,
not an aromatic vapor of wine left, the air
415percolating into and out of the neck as the sun’s
heat rises and falls: all is one, one all:
hallelujah: he gets back up on his bulldozer
and shaking his locks backs the bulldozer up
5
dew shatters into rivulets on crunched cellophane
420as the newly-started bulldozer jars a furrow
off the mesa, smoothing and packing down:
flattening, the way combers break flat into
speed up the strand: unpleasant food strings down
the slopes and rats’ hard tails whirl whacking
425trash: I don’t know anything much about garbage
dumps: I mean, I’ve never climbed one: I
don’t know about the smells: do masks mask
scent: or is there a deodorizing mask: the
Commissioner of Sanitation in a bug-black Caddy
430hearse-long glisters creepy up the ziggurat: at
_________
the top his chauffeur pops out and opens the
big back door for him: he goes over a few feet
away, puts a stiff, salute-hand to his forehead
and surveys the distances in all depths: the
435birds’ shadows lace his white sleeve: he
rises to his toes as a lifting zephyr from the
sea lofts a salt-shelf of scent: he approves: he
extends his arm in salute to the noisy dozer’s
operator, waves back and forth canceling out
440any intention to speak, re-beholds Florida’s
longest vistas, gets back into the big buggy
and runs up all the windows, trapping, though,
a nuisance of flies: (or, would he have run
the windows down: or would anyone else have:
445not out there: strike that:) rightness, at
any rate, like a benediction, settles on the
ambiance: all is proceeding: funding will be
continued: this work will not be abandoned:
this mound can rise higher: things are in order
450when heights are acknowledged; the lows
ease into place; the wives get back from the laundromat,
the husbands hose down the hubcaps; and the
seeringly blank pressures of weekends crack
away hour by hour in established time: in your
455end is my beginning: the operator waves back
to the Commissioner, acknowledging his understanding
_________
and his submission to benign authority, and falls
to thinking of his wife, née Minnie Furher, a woman
of abrupt appetites and strict morals, a woman
460who wants what she wants legally, largely as a
function of her husband’s particulars: a closet
queen, Minnie hides her cardboard, gold-foiled
crown to wear in parade about the house when
nobody’s home: she is so fat, fat people
465like to be near her: and her husband loves
every bit of her, every bite (bit) round enough to get
to: and wherever his dinky won’t reach, he finds
something else that will: I went up the road
a piece this morning at ten to Pleasant Grove
470for the burial of Ted’s ashes: those above
ground care; those below don’t: the sun was
terribly hot, and the words of poems read out
loud settled down like minnows in a shallows
for the moment of silence and had their gaps
475and fractures filled up and healed quiet: into
the posthole went the irises and hand-holds of dirt:
spring brings thaw and thaw brings the counterforce
of planted ashes which may not rise again,
not as anything recognizable as what they leach
480away from: oh, yes, yes, the matter goes on,
turning into this and that, never the same thing
twice: but what about the spirit, does it die
_________
in an instant, being nothing in an instant out of
matter, or does it hold on to some measure of
485time, not just the eternity in which it is not,
but does death go on being death for a billion
years: this one fact put down is put down
forever, is it, or for forever, forever to be a
part of the changes about it, switches in the
490earth’s magnetic field, asteroid collisions,
tectonic underplays, to be molten and then not
molten, again and again: when does a fact end:
what does one do with this gap from just yesterday
or just this morning to fifty-five billion
495years—to infinity: the spirit was forever
and is forever, the residual and informing
energy, but here what concerns us is this
manifestation, this man, this incredible flavoring and
building up of character and éclat, gone,
500though forever, in a moment only, a local
event, infinitely unrepeatable: the song of
the words subsides, the shallows drift away,
the people turn to each other and away: motors
start and the driveways clear, and the single
505fact is left alone to itself to have its first
night under the stars but to be there now
for every star that comes: we go away who must
ourselves come back, at last to stay: tears
_________
when we are helpless are our only joy: but
510while I was away this morning, Mike, the young
kid who does things for us, cut down the
thrift with his weedeater, those little white
flowers more like weedsize more than likely:
sometimes called cliff rose: also got the grass
515out of the front ditch now too wet to mow, slashed:
the dispositional axis is not supreme (how tedious)
and not a fiction (how clever) but plain (greatness
flows through the lowly) and a fact (like as not)
6
a pain in the knee or hipjoint or warps and
520knots in the leg muscles, even strange, binding
twinges in the feet ought to cause you to include
in the list of possibilities that that the high
arch in one of your feet has slipped, shortening
you shortlegged, your weight misdistributed,
525your organs and moves skewed: of
course, if you already had a broken arch in
the other foot, then with both feet flat, you
should notice a considerable improvement of
sorts: if you were longlegged in one leg
530and the foot of that leg went flat then you
might be overwhelmed with improvement of still
another kind: but, of course, if then the
_________
short leg shortened to a flat foot, you’d be
back in dutch and puzzled by the consequences
535especially if you knew nothing of the causes:
things are sustained by interrelations and
variety but when something goes wrong who
can isolate the active cause, an
active ingredient often riding in a complex of
540contextual vectors: and nothing short of a
laboratory experiment in which controlled
circumstances can be evaluated one at a time
is likely to prove limitingly clarifying: I
was coming out of Goldwin Smith Hall after mail
545call on a nova-bright late May day, the blues
and greens outdoing each other, when a dear friend
said, come and see, it’s Ralph, he’s in the car, and
thinking, I’ve never been asked to come see
Ralph before, I said, is anything the
550matter, and she said, terminal cancer of the brain,
and I said, terminal cancer of the brain, and
she said, I found out a week ago, but don’t say
anything to him: so, in the glaring light, his
window rolled down, I was talking with an old friend
555as if the past twenty-five years of all three of us
as colleagues had shifted out of reach: everything
is theater and eternity is nothing at
all: yesterday, a man whose picture I’d just
_________
seen in the local paper was going into the basement
560of Lincoln Hall when I said, I saw that piece
about you in the paper, isn’t that an early
retirement: I’m 63, he said: so’m I, I said:
my wife isn’t well, he said, we want to travel;
do you think about retiring: all the time, I
565said, but to what: departments grow haired and blackhaired
and shade away into white and dome-shine at the top:
the dissolve moves through tenure, or a job elsewhere,
part time, retirement, death: there never is
a department really but a slow flow you can’t step
570in twice: on writing a poem—you sit vacant and
relaxed (if possible), your mind wandering
freely, unengaged and in search of focus: you
may sit this way for several minutes till the
void unsettles you a bit and you become impatient
575with the intrusion of an awareness of yourself
sitting with a touch of unwelcome exasperation
over a great blank: but you keep your mind
open and on the move and eventually there is a
trace of feeling like a bit of mist on a backroad
580but then it reappears stronger and more central,
still coming and going, so the mind can’t
grab it and hold on to it: but the mind begins
to make an effort, to shed from itself all
_________
awareness except that of going with the feeling,
585to relax and hold the feeling—the feeling
is a brutal burning, a rich, raw urgency:
the mind knows that it is nothing without the
feeling, so concentrating on the feeling, it
dreams of imminent shapes, emergences, of
590clust’ral abundances, of free flow, forms discernible,
material, concrete, shapes on the move, and
then the mind gives way from its triggering, and
the mechanisms of necessity fall into, grasping the
upheaval, the action of making; the presence
595of pressure appears, forces open a way, the
intensity heightens, groans of anguish and
satisfaction break from the depths of the
body, and the sweet dream occurs, the work
payloads, the fall-away slips through, the body
600contracts and returns, ease lengthens throughout
the byways, and the mind picks up on the
environment again, turns to the practical
policing of the scene, restores itself to
normalcy and the objective world, the body hitching
605itself up on the way: shit fire (and save matches):
we wheeled down the long glide from the mountains
into Wheeling: morning fog smoked away the tops
of hills and a river (or two) confluencing slashed
across by scary iron bridges jammed the narrowed
_________
610valley road, when the big black mouth of a tunnel
suddenly opened out of fog in solid rock, all the
events at once happening in the shakes: but then going
on down Route 7 along the Ohio; mammoth standings
of steam, way out of size, too solid to vanish, oozed
615up from the nuclear craters, so much so tall that even
on our side of the river the outsized opal shades
of steam broke across us, shadowing us once and again:
slows like flying by or trying to drive to a mountain,
the far ahead lingering far behind: the freeway of
620refineries, chemical steams, the gross companies
toughening the banks down by the banks of the O-hi-o.
7
is it all going to be like this: you wake up
in the morning and there is that: the next
morning, it’s something else, and none of it
625makes much sense: and then one day the weight
whomps down and you jack-spring onto a
different floe or the road you were doing seventy
on rumbles or runs out of road:
meanwhile, baked potatoes are still fine,
630split down the
middle, buttered up, the two white
cakes steaming, the butter (or sour cream) oozing
down and sex is, if any, good, and there’s that time
between dawn and day when idle birds assert song
_________
whereas a little while later they’re quiet at
635hunt or nest: and when during the drying out after
rains the trickle in the ditch bottom
quivers by a twig-built strait, the
wonder of it all returns, the separations, ditches?
ditches? rain?, a self?, a self?, being
640here?, where?, here?, where’s here?, splits, slices,
slits; quick-cut, overlapping dialog; a series of
declining peaks; dwindlings of a woman’s bushy
