by A. R. Ammons
2040sacred and others secular and some say everything
is sacred or everything is secular: but if
_________
everything is sacred (or secular), then what is
that: words, which attach to edges, cannot
represent wholeness, so if all is all, then it
2045just is: snakes have been worshipped, but I
consider them a little on the light side of
sacred, and although evil brown recluses electrify
dark corners with meaning, thus making cleanings
paradisiacal, I don’t suppose they can quite
2050symbolize resurrection, the way scarabs can:
still, it seems evident that in the lush mercy
of the giver of things one should not be so
sparing as to think that generosity would trim
a slither off the divinity of any creature: so
2055it is all probably not a matter of the sacred
and secular, the good and bad, virtuous and
evil but a matter of measure; that is, it is
the fullness thereof; and all things that exist
are full of the fullness thereof and cannot,
2060without loss, be tapped, drained, squooshed, or
stuck on fine little pins: to be on the lookout
for evil (swamp rattlers) is a form of paying
attention, and to pay attention is to behold the
wonder, and the rights, of things, so just as
2065the fear of losing something (or someone) increases
its value enormously, so wariness of vipers and
other maelstroms of panic give us the brilliant
_________
morning, the sun brittle on the hill-line before
it pops an arc-glob: there may be some husks,
2070chaff which the wind bloweth away, right on the
bottom of things, such as poison hulls or juices
from lethal vines, so with that division, I would
rather call everything else holy, you know, even
plowing a good way into garbage, taking that on
2075as having, perhaps, just served a sacred function
or, having passed through the cleansing of decay,
just about to: for, you know, forms are never
permanent form, change the permanence, so
that one thing one day is something else another
2080day, and the energy that informs all forms just
breezes right through filth as clean as a whistle:
all this stuff here is illusory, you know, and
while it gives you bad dreams and wilding desires
and sometimes makes you spit up at night, it is
2085the very efflorescence of the fountain of shapes,
so while I might regard the digestive fire lit
at the top of the mound a purifying ritual, the
white smoke an incense, highrising as a wish,
aromatic as a blessing, I think I would not be
2090blasphemous, unless, of course, we as fallen
creatures should divide things up and strive to
be holy, not whole: things go round and
round and tie up a fullness which I call the
_________
reality, the reality of the soup that includes
2095all chunks, and the reality is holy in my view,
if one may be permitted a view in matters so
significant: it is generally held by scientific
people and even some secular humanists that if
you visit immediate outer space you will not
2100find the portals of heaven but a metallic
clutterment you should be trying to go at the
same speed as: similar orbits, similar speeds:
time, space, and such like gets funny and you
could suffer a hit in the head by an overthrusted
2105tidbit: but it can seem slow, as with an
18,000½ mph object overtaking an 18,000 mph
object—it can seem to take all day, if there
were a day up there (there’ll be no night): see
what I mean: days are little bent rectangles
2110turned round the world: actually, days are
durances in the eternal beam the diurnal earth turns
(daily?) through: but don’t feel bad about the
celestial garbage, orbits thick and thin: it is
composed of the same matter that rusts in the
2115asteroids or fusions in the sun: celestial
garbage is so far the highest evidence of our
existence here: except for that vehicle that
got away: but the mystique of high places lingers
on, the altar-like flames residual in the high
_________
2120levels of trash management: asteroids could pepper
earth to auras of salt-white pumice with the indifference
the collar of a launch missile could whack you
bumfuzzled: if there is to be any regard for
human life, it will have to be ours, right regard
2125for human life including all other forms of life,
including plant life: when we eat the body of
another animal, we must undergo the sacrifice
of noticing that life has been spent into our
life, and we must care, then, for the life we
2130have and for the life our life has cost, and we
must make proper acknowledgments and sway some
with reverence for the cruel and splendid tissue
biospheric: I love a poem every bit assimilated
into motion, whereas some will dwell with a
2135rubbish heap of bone, boulder, rust weir, wing
feather, cot spring, sounds pretty nice: properly
turned out, anything can most please me:
anxiety likes (an anxious person likes) to sit
midst an emptiness, emptiness wearing away, absorbing
2140the nettles and inflictive formations of things,
whereas cold folks love the stimulations of
pricks and tensions, intolerable griefs and
leanings, terrifying risks and exposures: the
cold out of all this terror get a pleasant move
2145only: can you imagine: even, though, the
_________
anxious calm down occasionally and want to turn
away from the boredom of coming down and the
boredom of anxiety by taking an interest in
something: even, sometimes, taking a little
2150interest in something displaces the anxiety,
refocuses the attention, puts the mind off
itself: on a shelf is a good place to put the
mind: the mind, I have heard so much in its
praise: it comes to your rescue only if you’ve
2155already heard of it: the wise, though, have
all the time been gobbling, balling, iffing, fighting:
the mind’s a pale savior: the soup it brings
is clearer even than the high recipes of
anxiety, the zombie land of the totally present
2160totally absent: but it pacifies the losers,
it absorbs the distractions from the actual:
there is a place for it: anxiety can go into
Wanamaker’s, for example, and breeze aisles of
its way in burning networks throughout the nine
2165levels or so of merchandise and look for nothing,
stumble on nothing, nothing of interest: it
will, on the other hand, name the spot on a kid’s
collar, think universal thoughts about some
artificial piece of defenestration or
2170look under the occult, religious, or children’s
section for a nonexistent book of poems: out of
_________
it:
wow: patience wants to know how to needle
and thread and what oil to use on the threading
spool and why sometimes the best piece of
2175wood is not right for what you have in mind:
prosodically speaking, anxiety is none too keen
on entanglements, as with the bitchy requirements
of form or rhyme: being trapped into a failing
consideration, or simply being trapped, races
2180anxiety up a rev too high: anxiety wants to
mow through: a clean sweep, forget the legislation
and, often, truly, it can be so nice to watch
the classical move through the complication, as
with Larry Bird en route for a lay-up, and
2185anxiety often itself has such heights of stalled
cumuli it can perform miracles, it can in seeking
ease deal with more substance than a clanking bore
can: it can, oh, yes, and that is the best
kind of poetry, the kind that seeking resolution
2190and an easing out of tension still out-tenses the
intensifiers: understatement rides swells
of easing away: anything else is sunk barges,
no gouging good, and practically everything
else is like that: the hackers, having none,
2195hack away at intensity: they want to move,
disturb, shock: they show the idleness of
pretended feeling: feeling moves by moving
_________
into the considerations of moving away: real
feeling assigns its weight gently to others,
2200helps them meet, deal with the harsh, brutal,
the ineluctable, eases the burdens of unclouded
facts: the strident hackers miss no chance to
dramatize, hurt, fairly or unfairly, for they
fear their emptiness: the gentlest, the most
2205refined language, so little engaged it is hardly
engaging, deserves to tell the deepest wishes,
roundabout fears: loud boys, the declaimers,
the deaf listen to them: to the whisperers,
even the silent, their moody abundance: the
2210poem that goes dumb holds tears: the line,
the fire line, where passion and control waver
for the field, that is a line so difficult to
keep in the right degree, one side not raiding
the other: if I reap the peripheries will I
2215get hardweed seed and dried roughage, roughage
like teasel and cattail and brush above snow in
winter, pure design lifeless in a painted hold.
1989
BRINK ROAD (1996)
for my wife and son
A Sense of Now
Rock frozen and fractured
spills, a shambles,
and tiers of time pile into,
shatter through
5other tiers or angle up
oddly, brightly lined with
granite or talus, a jumble,
“metaphysical debris”:
but the stream finding its
10way down a new hill spills
along the right ledges, shifts
the schist chips about and
down with becoming coherence,
and moss beds down ruffling
15shale edges dark gray
to green, and the otter
drinks from sidepools
almost perfectly clear.
(1996)
Picking Up Equations
Not smart to be out under trees with the wind still this
high: billowing & breaking bring down stob ends
of last year’s drought-wood that died way up in the branches,
and a nick on the noggin could drop you, no one around
5to see after you or call rescue, or you could just be
dazzled and wander off down the road, wild: still, don’t
you like picking up storm cast, swatches of leaves snapped
off, bark rippings, to weight the wind’s reach each thing
gave to, how high it held or hung, what angle brought
10it down: one thing’s certain, falls shadow the wind,
ellipses, sprung, noding downwind to the arc including everything.
(1995)
Enameling
The ice-bound spruce boughs
point downward
as if to
slide their sheathes off:
5the fairest morning
in weeks, crystalline,
yields to the fire
rising in the east:
even the smallest presences
10take on orientation—lit
and shaded snow, twinkling
millions in starred
ground frost, dust-snow
highlighting twigs
15lighting birds
flurry free to light on.
1979 (1979)
Up-Country
Their faces fire-red and steaming, the hunters
are out the first morning along the edges and
crossings of backroads: guns unlocked hang
broken over their arms: they blow the fist not
5caught in the jacket pocket: back home, the wife
is out of the kitchen and off to work, work now
mostly deskwork, women’s work: the men pad their
right shoulders, eager for the answering recoil
of the spent thrust: the bark on the snow-paled
10trees seems pure male: the brush thicket, the
mazes of stripped vines, the sunk water under
pooled leaves, the slash-back branches are male,
the bucks springing, startled still, dropping:
back at the office, in the shop, the women are
15fiddling with papers: out here, the parameters
burst, the deep roots of the caverns spill through.
Sparklings
The mind derives
from the manifold
concretions and
motions of nature
_________
5motions of its own
reaching up into the
curvatures of unity
but is not
content to vanish,
10extinguished, into the
resolutions of nothingness,
but precisely as the
world’s world fades
behind
15projects structures of
design,
placements,
so that capability’s
entanglements can filigree
20the very
freedom of nothingness,
the mind’s world
shining direction from
the void of unity
25toward the enchantments
of what needs to be.
(1988)
Cool Intimacies
What the power is and what
we can do to save
_________
ourselves with or from it,
how are we to know,
5receiving it sieved, in hints
and doubleblips, echoes from
dubious bluffs, silent
declarations, birds and leaves
in motion, announcements
10from “bodies” and points of light:
flood or puddle, whatever
it is, it stands
in the Way: we here and
there ride, wade, drown.
1975
Fascicle
There’s a rift of days sunny (not too windy, not
too cold) between leaf- and snowfall when
raking works: away on a weekend, you could
miss it and rain could sog everything slick-flat
5or gusts could leave no leaf not lifting
off the ground: stick
around the house, a big sheet ready, a strong-caned
&nb
sp; rake strung tight, and catch the sun
just when it stills the air dry: that’s likely
10to be before some cold front frost-furring
the saw-edged leaves glistened brittle, clouds
tightening the horizon: then the white leaves fly.
1993
Loving People
This enterprise answers
to none of the natural
balances, trade-offs,
exactions: it doesn’t
5shape to debit
and credit
differences: people are
losing propositions: what
they build flakes away,
