The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2

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):