by A. R. Ammons
hump a horse, measure a suit, suit a measure:
I would at my age rather do this than
skateboard, but I can think of nothing I’d
1205rather do than think of skateboard loops out
of skateboard bowls, the various designs in the
momenta: the rising up in rounds over the rims.
12
a waste of words, a flattened-down, smoothed-over
mesa of styrofoam verbiage; since words were
1210introduced here things have gone poorly for the
planet: it’s been between words and rivers,
surface-mining words and hilltops, cuneiform
records in priestly piles; between clay
tablets and irrigated fields: papyrus in
1215sheets; vellum in Alexandria; hundreds of
temples to type and, now, networks of words
intricate as the realities they represent:
a persiflageous empurpling: the rains clear,
the blue sky’s ragged white clouds shine up
_________
1220the greens of treetops: the driveway is thick
with sugarmaple seed the chipmunk fills his
pouches with fast: the spirea bush, the five
nearly round, slightly dented petals to each
blossom, snows the ground white during rains:
1225the norway maple I cut back in the hedge has
turned out leaves ten inches between the
points! the robin down by the fence just about
sings his head off now, close to dusk, his
belly lineated tight with slack worms: (yes, there’s
1230a chipmunk left, though the tabby’s lying out
for him): we must have the biggest machine,
fifty miles around, find the smallest particles,
and the ditchwork of the deepest degradation
reflects waters brighter than common ground:
1235poetry to no purpose! all this garbage! all
these words: we may replace our mountains with
trash: leachments may be our creeks flowing
from the distilling bottoms of corruption:
our skies, already browned, may be our brown
1240skies: fields may rise from cultivation into
suffocation: here was a silvery-green-blue-bright
planet, held in sway for hundreds of millions
of years by leathery monsters racing about roaring
and tearing, terrible cries of contest by
1245lakeshores in placid evenings, terrible cries of
_________
assault at night, etc., all shoved away, imagine:
and then along came the frail one, our ancestor,
scavenger, seed finder, nut cracker, fruit
picker, grubs, bulbs, etc., and here we are at
1250last, last, probably, behold, we have replaced
the meadows with oilslick: when words have
driven the sludge in billows higher than our
heads—oh, well, by then words will have left
the poor place behind: we’ll be settling
1255elsewhere or floating interminably, the universe
a deep place to spoil, a dump compaction will
always make room in! I have nothing to say:
what I want to say is saying: I want to be
singing, sort of: I want to be engaged with
1260the ongoing: but I have no portmanteau filled
with portfolio: still, I am for something:
what am I for: I’m for rights consistent with
others’ rights: that says little but saying,
with a touch of singing: we’ll live no more on
1265this planet, we’ll live in the word: what:
we’ll get off: we’ll take it with us: our
equations will make any world we wish anywhere
we go: we’ll take nothing away from here but
the equations, cool, lofty, eternal, that were
1270nowhere here to be found when we came: we are
a quite special species, as it were: would to
_________
mercy those who went before in ignorance and
irresolution could know they forwarded a part,
though, of course, had they been told they’d
1275not have believed it: imagine, though we think
ourselves purposeless, we may be the thinnest
cross-section of an upcoming announcement, and
though we cannot imagine what the purpose might
be, even now it may be extruding itself, tiny
1280threads of weak energy fields, right through
us: first an earth in peace; then, hundreds of
years looking for other wars: strife and peace,
love and grief, departure and return: gliding
we’ll kick the l out of the world and cuddle
1285up with the avenues and byways of the word:
13
the real trouble with a blabbermouth is that when
he talks and keeps talking, pretty soon he’s
talking around, and pretty soon he’s
on the other side! of where he was: a real man
1290doesn’t say two words because that way he opens
the narrowest, which is the most convictive
avenue to identity you can imagine: he doesn’t
fluff and fool, dip and weave, elaborate and
wander off into sophistic woods of ramification,
1295but a fool blabberer cannot believe all the
_________
things he says himself, indeed he believes nothing
except the wisdom of agreeing with whomever he
meets: he can present a scaffolding exfoliation, a
splaying network of words that will accommodate the color
1300of any man’s opinion, or woman’s: in fact, the
blabberer is so without trace of any bias of
his own, he unwittingly does the good of feeling
out so many positions persons of opposing
words or twos can find themselves assembled in
1305a common place, and though they throw the
blabberer out, they make peace ungratefully in
the verbal provinces of a pure dissemblance:
of his making: and with the best blabberers,
this does not necessarily amount to circumlocution
1310some of the best succinct as hell and twice
as flashy: and a blabbermouth, wandering around
in disquisitional irresponsibility, can sashay
by your one or two words and contextualize them
(odd that the tillers of the soil here, the
1315earthworms, are the harvest (robins get them)
while the crop (grass) is thrown away): the
loudmouth, though, can be distinguished from
the blabbermouth in that loudness requires more
energy of formation and broader executions of
1320lip and jaw, slowing delivery and, in extreme
cases, tiring the speaker silent: though his
tenure is shortened, the loudmouth’s audience
_________
is compensatingly wider: where the blabbermouth
may be down to a kind of hissing even the
1325nearest have to strain to hear, the loudmouth
satisfactorily delivers effortlessly received
phraseology spanning hundreds: nothing is
perfect, unless you can unite two good sides from
different situations: to be a loudmouth
1330blabbermouth is to be a trifle above, a wonder:
there are those, also mixtures of good and bad
elements, who will say nothing: they will look
and fuck—nothing: they will eat a whole meal
and take half an hour to belch: these stolid
1335people are solid: they resem
ble blabbermouths
in a way in that they set up circumstances into
which you can read any message or from which
derive any picturation: but if the measure of
a man is not how much he says or how loud, I’m
1340sure I cannot imagine what to say next: a
thunderhead topping out at 65,000 feet can
deliver hailstones a foot deep into your field:
or golfball-size smokestones, the pollution,
you know: in the milky days of early June,
1345cone pollen so thick it hazes cars in an hour
and leaves broad yellow outlines to macadam
pools after rain—in those days, in those days
oh, yes, in those days: it is after all only
_________
about what it is about: if it is mundane then
1350that is what it is: if it is mundane with an
element of the remarkable, an element of the
remarkable is with it: if it is mostly remarkable,
it is likely to be unlikely: the remarkable,
become occasional, wears unremarkable, and what
1355happens frequently hardly happens at all: I
looked into the pit of death and it was there,
the pit was, and the death: I circled it saying
this looks like safety’s surcease next to which
risks’ splits and roars, the sparrow’s lone note
1360in the gray tree, are radiances: the rocks
came up to me in a wall saying they would say
nothing, and the trees bent away as in wind
their tops hanging on to silence, and I could
make nothing out in the brook’s fuzzy bustle:
1365the bushes huddled down by the pinewoods as if
looking for a path leading in, with no saying
and no listening either, so I derived the nature
of each thing from itself and made each derivation
speak, the mountains quietly resounding and very
1370authoritative, their exalted air perfect grain
of the spiritual, the sense of looking down so
scary half-love for height held: I made tongues
for adder’s-tongue, periwinkle, and jimminycricket;
they wagged, and these tongues rang in my head
_________
1375as in a chanson delicate of essence and point:
an assemblage, a concourse of intercourse, a
recourse: what is it, that you would turn down
a prairie for it, the prairie said as I went
on, my eyes set longsighted, and the turtle
1380eased needlepoint airholes up from swampwater,
his eyes quizzical in a downturn, and said,
where else does the shadow of the logknots fall
more sharply dark on the water, but I didn’t
have time to take time: I spent every coin I
1385had into the good business of my own burning:
one day the whirlwinds gathered in the flats by
the foot of a range and turned and turned for
some hours, sidling up alongside ravines or
skiddling out among the sharp bush to gather
1390more sand, or just standing around idly spinning
like elegant women put off somewhere without
hats, but dusk’s blue called them off finally,
each to a separate valley, and by the time the
moon chipped the range line, all the conversation
1395of the day had become arroyo or talus stone,
motionless as a sun drinking distant water:
the next day the red-shouldered rusty hills
woke the whirlwinds, first wobbly and vague,
but, the sun creaking the rocks, taller and
1400slenderer than lombardies, and they elegantly
_________
regathered in a far hollow of the plains and
spun all day, all day spinning and humming,
reaching so high their tops seemed to be
hollowing out holes in the sky: they hummed
1405continents’ stories, hornets’ nests of round
persuasions: they inched about in their spinning:
they pillared the sky but, when clouds of
conestogas or icebergs floated over, dissolved,
stringing undone: a weaving, a shuttle, a
1410fabric, a going staying where you are: the
whirlwind, not human, I’m the whirlwind: the
creaking hills, not human, my silence cracks and
creaks: the flow of clouds not mine, my
motions trained clear by clouds: and the
1415streams’ yielding bending fathers my winding:
and the semicircles’ gusts before storms make
grassclumps draw in the sand—these are the
going closures that organize mind, allowing
and limiting, my mind’s ways: the rabbit’s
1420leaps and halts, listenings, are prosody of
a poem floating through the mind’s brush: I
mix my motions in with the mix of motions, all
motions cousins, conveyors, purveyors, surveyors,
rising from the land, eddying coils of a wash,
1425bristling with fine-backed black clarity as with
brookripples over stone, spreading out, evaporating
_________
or seeping in under, soaking, salt flats, the
turkey buzzard whirling, the wind whirling,
the giant “stills” of the sea and I, and sand,
1430whirling, stalling, breaking out, getting on,
coming round—cousins, not silent, either,
communicative, but not with human sound,
communicative motions making sounds, much mutual
glistening in a breezy grove of spring aspen speech
14
1435take, in leavetaking, the leavings: feed your
bony dog, your cat stalking stiff in hunger-meows:
gather up the scraps for pig-swill: anything
thrown out to the chickens will be ground fine
in gizzards or taken underground by beetles and
1440ants: this will be transmuted into the filigree
of ant feelers’ energy vaporizations: chunk and
smear, grease and glob will boil refined in
time’s and guts’ alembics, the air carbonized
rich, potash in lacy leavings’ milding terrain:
1445a breadcrumb borne away by hundreds like a stone
waist-high many legs to the pyramid: but nothing
much can become of the clear-through plastic
lid: it finds hidden security in the legit
museums of our desecrations—the mounds, the
1450heights of discard: meaningless is the
_________
providence, the wiping clear of planes where we
can structure possibility into whatever housings
level out: the antecedent of meaning is not
meaning always, meaning which could direct,
1455delimit, interfere, but the absence of meaning:
we should be pretty happy with the possibilities
and limits we can play through emergences free
of complexes of Big Meaning, but is there
really any meaninglessness, isn’t meaninglessness
1460a funny category, meaninglessness missing
meaning, vacancy still empty, not any sort of
disordering, or miscasting or fraudulence of
irrealities’ shows, just a place not meaning
yet—perhaps, of course, and appropriately,
1465never to mean: space, the terror of the
unimaginably empty and endless, distances stars,
for example, not to mention the core-fire of the
galaxy, so we cellular brushfires can burn cool
&
nbsp; in a way-off arm: there is truly only meaning,
1470only meaning, meanings, so many meanings,
meaninglessness becomes what to make of so many
meanings: and, truly, everything is real, so
real, the climbing cloud-towers this morning,
each in its individual space so white-heighted,
1475silent, slow; the squirrel hide still lined here
and there with dried curls of meat, legbones
_________
nearly outlined still in place, this out on the
lawn, tossed there perhaps from the road or
dragged in by a crow (a yardful of treesful of
1480raucous crows raising young every spring):
