by A. R. Ammons
head as if caught in a brush fire:
I have seen the future; it just went by, put
645away: it advertises strokes, hip replacements,
insulin shots, sphygmomanometers or digital
punches: there is an end to delays and
remedies, regimens, and rehabs; another
pathology interrupts following on pathology:
650terrible descriptions of outcomes appear here
and there, and outcomes, around which, though,
humor glints or boundless guffaws roll combers:
we’re trash, plenty wondrous: should I want
to say in what the wonder consists: it is a tiny
655wriggle of light in the mind that says, “go on”:
that’s what it says: that’s all it says: river
edges clear up into furrows: the spear lengthens
till fish can’t outleap its accuracy: what is
most beyond what is most beyond must be seen into:
_________
660love must be held still a minute to see if anything
can be said about it: if one negative will do,
will two negatives do more, more than two affirmatives:
shall the lines continue to move a little in sum longer:
but if a lake can look glassy, can’t a building: it’s
665just a little piece of translucent, whitish light,
it wriggles, it is like, say, one meander, one whole
meander that came from nowhere and goes nowhere
but it wriggles and guess what it says: have I
cajoled you lately that I wantya: I’m none too
670interested in regions because there’s plenty of
spelled-out cultural differentiation in isolationisms,
and, anyhow, it’s passing: I’m interested in the
differentiations of which there are now few that the
whole globe can belong to: precarious abstraction will
675have to be the world’s feed for a long time
before the little bits, so few, of concretion
and worldwide specification begin to appear,
but, though scanty, growing and leading into a
growing world, not one spent: globe-round—
680one thinks, slapping down the lines, making time
with eternity, one will thrive beyond the brink but
beyond the brink is no recollection but a wide
giving way into silver that filters farther away
into nothing: ghosts haunt the fields and hills,
685the moon-soaked woodpaths, the misty cattail bogs
_________
the littlest time, for they are attracted to the
light, the one a little farther on, a little farther,
and the light pulls them all away, and then, who knows,
becomes a rose wasted, perhaps, on the backside of
690some barn, the summary rose rambled unseen: have
you stopped to think what existence is, to be here
now where so much has been or is yet to come and
where isness itself is just the name of a segment
of flow: stop, think: millennia jiggle in your eyes
695at night, the twinklers, eye and star: the glistening
on the leaves when morning dew runs, little streaks
that head into drops, nodding leaves: think how
fine a motion sensation is, that it sweeps the nerves
and aligns the body’s every cell because another
700exists: all the bets are off if
pain is walking around the table cutting you or
someone else up, or if poverty has worked its way
up into your knees or you can’t get your eyes dry,
or a child is bruised or a woman cornered
705or thrills and violence can’t be distinguished:
then existence recalls with relief that existence
ends, that our windy houses crack their frames
and spill, that nothing, not even cold killing bothers
the stars: twinkle, twinkle: just a wonder:
710I say, globe-round selfempowerment like this could
be difficult and, perhaps, dangerous in the actual, but
_________
these ways of words merely trace out designs
many can split up the filling in of: I punched
out Garbage at the library and four titles
715swept the screen, only one, Garbage Feed,
seeming worth going on to; and that was about
feeding swine right: so I punched Garbage Disposal
and the screen came blank—nothing! all those
titles, row on row, of western goodies, mostly
720worse than junk, but not a word on Disposal: I
should have looked, I suppose, under Waste Disposal
but, who cares, I already got the point: I
know garbage is being “disposed” of—but what
I wanted I had gotten, a clear space and pure
725freedom to dump whatever, and this means most
of the catalog must go, so much that what is
left will need no computer to be kept track of:
har: words are a specialization on sound
making a kind of language: but there are many
730not just languages but kinds of language: the
bluejay’s extensive vocabulary signals states
of feeling or being—alarm, exasperation,
feeding, idleness—and the signal systems
lay out the states for the safety of sharing
735by others, alerting to danger, even sharing
food sources: whales’ pod-songs keep intimate
transactions fluid: horses neigh, whinny, and
_________
snuffle (coach): elephants network even distant
air with sound waves too low for us to hear:
740oh, no: we are not alone in language: we may
be alone in words, at least, almost alone in
speaking them, not alone (Koko) in understanding
them, at least reacting to them: we are nearly
alone in words: but the words do for us what other
745languages do for others—they warn, inform,
reassure, compare, present: we may be alone in
words but we are not singular in language:
have some respect for other speakers of being and
for god’s sake drop all this crap about words,
750singularity, and dominion: it is so boring,
when I hear it a hook of anger in my guts tears
the lining: the world was the beginning
of the world; words are a way of fending in the
world: whole languages, like species, can
755disappear without dropping a gram of earth’s
weight, and symbolic systems to a fare you well
can be added without filling a ditch or thimble:
our cousins the birds talk in the morning: I
can tell the weather by their voices before
760I open my eyes: I know some of their “words”
because I know, share with them, their states
of being and feeling: my cousins the
robins tug worms up from the lawn and eat them
_________
and that gives me a piece of conflictual reality
765until I savor the hog in my bacon, admire the
thighbone in my chicken: when the hens used to
sing in the spring laying into their ladders,
the windy courtship time of mating and
nesting, I can hear the singing now, the good
770times: I know the entire language of chickens,
from rooster crows to biddy cheeps: it is a
language sufficient to the forms and procedures
nature assigned to chicken-birds but a language,
as competition goes, no
t sufficient to protect
775them from us: our systems now
change their genes, their forms and procedures,
house them up in all-life houses, trick their
egg laying with artificial days and nights:
our language is something to write home about:
780but it is not the world: grooming does for
baboons most of what words do for us.
8
sometimes old people snap back into life for a
streak and start making plans, ridiculous, you know,
when they will suddenly think of death again
785and they will see their coffins plunge upward
like whales out of the refused depths of their
minds and the change will feel so shockingly
_________
different—from the warm movement of a possibility
to a cold acknowledgment—they will seem not
790to understand for a minute: at other times
with the expiration of plans and friends and
dreams and with the assaults on all sides of
relapses and pains, they will feel a
smallish ambition to creep into their boxes
795at last and lid the light out and be gone,
nevermore, nevermore to see again, let alone
see trouble come on anyone again: oh, yes, there
are these moods and transitions, these bolt
recollections and these foolish temptations and
800stratagems to distract them from the
course: this is why they and we must keep our
minds on the god-solid, not on the vain silks
and sweets of human dissipation, no, sirree:
unless of course god is immanent in which case
805he may be to some slight extent part of the
sweets, god being in that case nothing more than or
as much as energy at large, a hair of it caught
in candy: I just want you to know I’m perfectly
serious much of the time: when I kid around
810I’m trying to get in position to be serious:
my daffydillies are efforts to excuse the
presumption of assumption, direct address, my
self-presentation: I’m trying to mean what I
_________
mean to mean something: best for that is a kind
815of matter-of-fact explicitness about the facts:
best of all, facts of action: actions, actions,
actions, human or atomic: these actions cut
curves out in space, spiral up or in, turn and
turn back, stall, whirl: these are the motions
820we learn from, these are the central figures,
this is the dance, here attitude and character,
precision and floundering lay out for us to see
their several examples, comically wasteful, as
with clowns or young squirrels playful at dusk:
825here is the real morality, the economy of
action and reaction, of driving ahead, of going
slow, of walking the line, the tightrope, here
the narratives of motion that tell the story
the stories figure into facticity: let’s
830study the motions, are they slovenly, choppy,
attenuating, high, meandering, wasteful: we
need nothing more, except the spelling out of
these for those inattentive or too busily lost
in the daily elaborations to prize the essential:
835(1) don’t complain—ills are sufficiently
clear without reiterated description: (2) count
your blessings, spelling them over and over into
sharp contemplation: (3) do what you can—
take action: (4) move on, keep the mind
_________
840allied with the figurations of ongoing: when
I was a kid I always, it seemed, had a point
I couldn’t say or that no one could accept—
I always sounded unconvincing; I lost the
arguments: people became impatient and stuck
845to their own beliefs; my explanations struck
them as strange, unlikely: when I learned
about poetry, I must have recognized a means
to command silence in them, the means so to
combine thinking and feeling, imagination and
850movement as to spell them out of speech:
people would buy the enchantment and get the
point reason couldn’t, the point delivered below
the level of argument, straight into the fat
of feeling: so I’m asking you to help me, now:
855yield to this possibility: I’m going to try to
say everything all over again: I’ve discovered
at sixty-three that the other thing I wished of
poetry, that it prevent death, has kept me a
little strange, that I have not got my feet out
860of the embranglements of misapplication and out
into a clear space to go; that I have to start
again from a realization of failure: in fact,
having learned about commanding silence and
having, mostly by accident, commanded it a few
865times, I’ve become afraid of convincingness,
_________
what harm it can do if there is too much of
it along with whatever good, so I am now a
little uncertain on purpose: I recognize cases
in other words from time to time that I’d rather
870see go through than my own: they seem wiser
cases: they come from people who seem better
wrapped around their spines: when their mouths
are open, their vertebrae form a sounding
foundation for their words: I have never,
875frankly, grown up, not if growing up means I
wouldn’t trade in what I have today for something
I might get tomorrow: I’m a trader: I’m still
looking for the buy to go all the way with:
I’ve become convinced that I don’t have
880anything particularly to convince anybody of: my
rhetoric goes on, though, with a terrible
machine-like insistence whether potholes
appear in the streets or not, or knots in my
line, or furriers in my traps: the trap shut
885displeases no prey: pray you, go ahead around
me; I’m letting go a few springs and bolts from
my current mechanism: I’m getting down: I’m
not recommending more altitude than wings, not
anymore, not lately: no, no: not on your life.
9
890you don’t want to succeed too early and live
in the shadow of your own peek, peak, pock,
pork, puke: did I use the one about, the purpose
of being alive is to be alive: or the one about
the wildlife around here sometimes gets to be
895pretty wild: this yellow tabby, not a kaffir,
not a burmese, not a blue point siamese, not a
striped manx, but just some old yellow cat
come over here in our yard and stakes out the
chipmunk or the garage mouse or rabbits or
900squirrels: since we don’t have a cat of our
own, his irregular visits keep the prey items
puzzled: so yesterday morning, I saw the
yellow settling in by the big yew and the
sniffy rabbit came up the other side of the
905(look, how many lines are ending in the)
house on the driveway and when he turned into
the backyard, the tabby dived out for him and
in a few lean spreads of limbs just missed him:
the rabbit did not take off down the permanent
<
br /> 910road: he moved off just far enough away to be
out of range of a cat sprint, and he sat still
as the world can get, subduing, I suppose, his
patting heart’s fear in the very midst of fear: for—
_________
well, there’s one chipmunk you won’t see
915streaking around here anymore, plunging into
cement holes by the back steps or into ground
holes by the hydrangea or scrambling into the
crack under the middle post of the garage:
because (this is late the same day) I just saw
920tabby walking away with him in his mouth: not
a white longhair, not an abyssinian, not a
