by A. R. Ammons
(here on the 10th it is so late into spring
it is nearly early summer: the big days turn,
hardly wobbling in time for a couple of weeks or
so around this widest day): the anthill has
1485erupted gray-dry in the grass and the little
black buggers are circulating outside and inside
tunnels, as in cave weather or meshwork
digestive, arterial systems; the universe, you
may know, may be backed up like water behind a
1490dam, and it may spill, as it already has from
ten to four dimensions, still lower anyday: still
the world is not a show consciousness can pull
off or wipe out: because consciousness can neither
wipe out nor actualize it it is not a show but
1495the world: if one does not eat perception-blasted
potato, one will blast perception by the loss of
perception: starch (in Arch) in the potato
meets with my chemistry to enliven my chemistry,
clear my eyes, harden, perhaps, my muscle, wag
1500my tongue (almost certainly): hallelujah: if
death is so persuasive, can’t life be: it is
fashionable now to mean nothing, not to exist,
_________
because meaning doesn’t hold, and we do not exist
forever; this is forever, we are now in it: our
1505eyes see through the round time of nearly all
of being, our minds reach out and in ten billion
years: we are in so much forever, we pay it no
mind, we’d rather think of today’s shopping or
next week’s day off: but we will not be in
1510forever forever, that is the dropout: is it
too much to be in forever a while: dead we are
out of time and forever, both: I want to get
around to where I can say I’m glad I was here,
even if I must go: I want to believe that the
1515possibility given me to be here was not a betrayal
or trap or hoax but a trial of the possibility
of a possibility, that I can find firm grounds
for thinking what I want to think as well as
for despair, incoherence, distrust, drifting
1520acedia: nonreferentiality is a referentiality
of nonreferentiality: slap the world any way,
it flaps back: turn the dial past zero, it’s
back to one: nonrepresentation is a representation
of nonrepresentation: things are awash in
1525ideality: ideal meaninglessness, ideal absurdity,
ideal ideals: we want to know the reality of
these perfectly, ideally, as themselves: poems
that give up the ideal of making sense do not
_________
give up the ideal of not making sense: nom de
1530plumage best feathers a nest egg, ivory doorknob:
15
what are we to think of the waste, though: the
sugarmaple seeds on the blacktop are so dense,
the seedheads crushed by tires, the wings stuck
wet, they hold the rains, so there’s no walkway
1535dry: so many seeds, and not one will make a
tree, excuse the expression: what of so much
possibility, all impossibility: how about the
one who finds alcohol at eleven, drugs at seventeen
death at thirty-two: how about the little
1540boy on the street who with puffy-smooth face and
slit eyes reaches up to you for a handshake:
supposing politics swings back like a breeze and
sails tanks through a young crowd: what about the
hopes withered up in screams like crops in
1545sandy winds: how about the letting out of streams
of blood where rain might have sprinkled into
roadpools: are we to identify with the fortunate
who see the energy of possibility as its necessary
brush with impossibility: who defines meaning
1550only in the blasted landfalls of no meaning:
who can in safety call evil essential to the
differentiations of good: or should we wail
_________
that the lost are lost, that nothing can be right
until they no longer lose themselves, until we’ve found
1555charms to call them back: are we to take no
comfort when so much discomfort turns here and
there helplessly for help: is there, in other
words, after the balances are toted up, is there
a streak of light defining the cutting edge as
1560celebration: (clematis which looks as dead and
drained in winter as baling wire transports in
spring such leaves and plush blooms!) I walked
down the hall to the ward-wing surrounded on
three sides with windows’ light and there with
1565the other diabetics like minnows in the pool-head
of a tidal rising sat my father slumped,
gussied up with straps, in a wheelchair, a catheter leading
to the little fuel tank hung underneath, urine
the color of gasoline, my father like the
1570others drawn down half-asleep mulling over his
wheels: where, I thought, hope of good is gone
evil becomes the deliverer, and more evil, to get
one through to the clearing where presence, now
pain, enters oblivion: my father roused himself
1575and took some hope in me but then left me back
alone: at a point in evil, evil changes its
clothes and death with a soft smile crooks its
finger to us: a taking by death leaving the
_________
living bereft: such a mixture! where does a steady
1580formulation settle down: what integration
of wisdom holds scoured by the bottoms of . . .
bottoms? . . . questioned, I mean, by nibbling
exception and branching direction: every balance
overbalances: judiciousness loses the excitement
1585of error: realizing that there is no safety
is safety: the other side of anything is worth
nearly as much as the side: the difference
so slight in fact, that one goes out to see if
it is there: I want a curvature like the
1590arising of a spherical section, a sweep that
doesn’t break down from arc into word, image,
definition, story, thesis, but all these
assimilated to an arch of silence, an interrelation
permitting motion in stillness: I want to see
1595furrows of definition, both the centerings of
furrow and the clumpy outcastings beyond: I do
not want to be caught inside for clarity: I
want clarity to be a smooth long bend
disallowing no complexity in coming clean: why
1600do I want this, complexity without confusion,
clarity without confinement, time in time, not
time splintered: if you are not gone at a certain
age, your world is: or it is shriveled to a
few people who know what you know: aunts and
_________
1605uncles with their histories blanked out, the thick
tissue of relationships erased into one of emptiness
or maybe your cousins, too, are gone, and
the world has starved to a single peak,
you and what you know alone, with no one
1610else in the world to nod recognizing what you
say and recall without explanation: so, have
your choice to leave the world or have it leave
you; either way you c
hoose will bring the same
result, nothingness and the vanishment of
1615what was: over and over the world rolls in this
wise, so much so that people stricken with these
knowledges think the aspiration to win to be
remembered, to be let hanging, dibbling in the
minds of those continuing: but life is not first
1620for being remembered but for being lived! how
quaint and sad the lives of those who have lived
but are gone, the vacant sadness of two eternities
pressed together, squeezing them dry to
nondegradable remnants—trash: the meaning,
1625the tears, loves, sweet handholdings, all
the fears, jealousies, hangings, burnings—
throwaways, obsolescences that plug up
the circulations today, burdening the living
with guilty obligations of memory and service:
1630to have the curvature, though, one needs the
concisions of the local, contemplations such as
how to slice a banana for breakfast oatmeal,
fourteen thick or thirty-three thin events, the
chunky substance of fourteen encounters or the
1635flavor availabilities in limp circles: fly the
definite lest it lock you in! have solvent by
should the imperative devise you a vice: see
a spread of possibilities, not an onion plot:
the juggler has twice as many balls as hands
1640because it’s all up in the air: keep it up
in the air, boundingly like ephemera at dusk:
or dawn: I saw in Carolina morning flies
midair like floating stones: the dew, heavy;
the sun, blood red: a road dipping round a
1645pine grove down a hill to a pond, the spillway
clogged with cattails bent with breezes and with
redwings awilding day: a crippled old farmer
up early with his dog, noon likely to melt tar,
a benchlong of old blacks at the crossroads
1650gas station, dogfennel high on the woods’ edge,
some scraggly roastnear corn used up, tomato
plants sprawled out, become vines: morning,
gentlemen, how you all doing: these bitty
events, near pangs commonplace on this planet
1655so strangely turned out, we mustn’t take on so
but let the music sway, the rhetoric ride, the
_________
garbage heave, for if we allow one solid cast
of grief to flip and filter away into all the
trinklets it might go, we would be averaged
1660down to a multiple diminishment like acceptance:
but we mean to go on and go on till we unwind
the winding of our longest road, when, we
presume, the nothingness we
step to will mirror treasures we leave, a
1665strange mirror, everything in our lives having
taken root in love, the sequences having become
right because that is the way they had to run:
but, then, for the trouble of love, we may be
so tired that indifference will join ours to the
1670hills’ indifference and the broad currents of
the deep and the high windings of the sky, and
we may indeed see the ease beyond our
understanding because, till now, always beyond
16
a bird dabbed me, a virgin soil, as I issued
1675out under the open blue this morning, and
thinking it beetle or moth, I brushed it off my
shoulder and smeared do on one or more digits:
my thoughts flew to geese dumps and the numbers
of rafts of geese I’ve seen over unsoiled:
1680do migrating geese not do do as they, sprinkling, go,
or are they so high their droppings achieve
_________
vaporizing accelerations, like rocket launchers and
reentry cones, often part solid: or are there
not diarrhetic exceptions to control one might
1685have seen splat or been shloshed by: so many
specialities in our little knowledge: undone by
do, I forged on, noting the eternity of the
hill-line across the valley, uniting the ravines:
from Mérida, I’d keep vaguely north along
1690the valley, road and valley river tangling crossings,
down to where the road tends to the west and
rises back up toward the ridge before Valera:
I would rest a bit there or take a plane—
probably I would not take a plane but rent a
1695burro and go the long, small road on down to
Cabimas or Lago de Maracaibo, an excellent
shore, unfailingly warm: is there intermediacy
between hallucinatory flux and pure form’s rigid
thought and count: between diarrhea and constipation,
1700how about chunky intermediacy, some motion with
minor forms clear, clusters or bindings, with the
concomitant gaps, tie-offs and recommencements
expected: could not a narrative be the speed
and dimensions, feel, of a progression: and
1705could there not be a blow away of emptiness:
and a stasis, unmoving, unfeeling: impaction:
a robin rows out of a tree across the road and
_________
bombs a couple of dabs on the blacktop, as if
by dabs paying off flight: beads, actually:
1710but hitting the ground, the beads compress into disks
(little white disks) which peered into are alive
with bellyroundworms, intricate, worky, lily-white
flailing bellyworms, circumscribed in a sudden
dessication without wings: squirrels stop at
1715knotches to scratch and nuzzle: pests are all
over, and inside: if you’ve derived from life
a going thing called life, life has a right to
derive life from you: ticks, parasites, lice,
fleas, mites, flukes, crabs, mosquitoes, black
1720flies, bacteria: in reality, reality is like
still water, invisible, spiritual: the real
abides, spiritual, while entities come and go:
binds, warps, drives, with their accompanying
marvels, beauties, goals, solutions misconstrue
1725what we in time work out invisible again:
roundabout gives us a place to go: turbulence
livens our passion for clearing, clearing for
turbulence: is the ring of truth, however clear
and plain, superior to richness, to the beauty
1730of gooey language densely managed: or is truth
beauty, whenas so much truth is garbage by,
if by nothing else, obsolescence, obsolescence,
though, only a matter of habiliments, which are
_________
on and off, not essentials: poverty, burningly
1735true, is not beautiful: order excusing cruelty
is not beautiful but plenty truthful: mounds
on held mounds as well as sinkholes and deep
transgressions of trash are not beautiful:
deformity, deviance, disease are often ugly,
1740yet it must be said (it makes no nevermind to
me if it makes no nevermind to you) that much
good writing, for example—containing within
itself, if not in its matter, its manner, much
truth and beauty and beauty and truth—has
1745derived under the resources of stressed attention
or perilous need compensations not justifying
suffering but smartening up a corner in it her
e
and there: things that go around sometimes go
around so far around they come back around: if you
1750like my form, experience my function: doctors
lose all their patients, help often barely
distinguishable from the forwarding: tone with
an undertow: obscure verse—am I supposed to
understand that I’m not supposed to understand
1755it or not: some of these short guys are so
wellhung they’d give an inch off their dicks
if they could put it under their heels, and you
could jack down some of these tall guys a foot
if they could move into another inch: and the
