by A. R. Ammons
Changing Stations
The all-night rain running
off and soaking through
into the narrows
tore up the brooks, leaned
_________
5slates of shale
against the banks and, cutting some
bank away, rearranged chip shale
into new mounds, tiled close,
as if by hand, by
10water mortar (what a sound) but now
the brook’s so still,
pane clear, a treetop scrap of
birds like stubborn leaves
shines shaking in the brookbed
15filled
with a deeper ditch of sky.
1981 (1982)
Collapsed Structures
Terror when it goes leaves lifelessness’s big hole:
one does not wish it back, terror, fierce inhabitant,
a guest abruptly returned from a delayed leaving
there again at the door
5so the doorways stir and fly: but how
great the vacancy! the attention turning
about to no attendant, the polish of absence’s
gist: there’s the first-quarter moon,
though, its own light emptying out the whole
10dome, the sight of its loneliness confirming
one’s own: just somewhere to look
as if to find absence all together in one place:
recalling terror, though, may not be the same
as terror really gone, for in the recall of
15suasions of the recently departed is still much
_________
to muse on, the bridgeways and slidings to relief,
the simmering into assimilation of humiliation
and demand, the guest’s needs now only
images not to be answered or answered to:
20if terror moves on away through the miles and
hours and relief loses focus, tires of dawdling,
and feels the first scorch of nothingness, oh, then,
emptiness’s own terror becomes another guest or
the same or just another some day, after
25long entertainments, to take grateful leave of.
(1996)
Flat Rock
Streams divided (around a boulder-cluster or
barge) heal right back together:
gravity’s bed takes it all one way, the same
water the substance of distant, subsequent
5occasions: water shaken white over
rapids-stones downstream bursts white again
into falls-holes, a permanent eventuum
that takes a name—falls, of course, but
Blank Falls if people stare there, and
10this water wrinkles later on through a
sluice so fast people stop to think
about it: Streaking Sluice names that place:
later still this stream spreads out flat over
a shallows-wide ledge-bed, a swim you can
15get all the way into almost without getting wet.
(1996)
Flurries
Streaks, drifts, mounds
of meaning build,
flare: roof-lochs spill,
catching at the eaves
5meanings
icicle-clear:
glaciers grind visionary
meanings down nordic gorges,
letting fall
10rivers to rustle
narrows amply clean cut:
hold still, the
spirit cries, hold this,
but motion
15undermines meaning with meaning.
1985
The Deep End
Stillness can’t hold
still, gets
the shivers and shatters:
self-regulating systems
5swinging through opposing
loops’ ceaseless adjustment
and re-direction, though, find
variable ways to stay:
mood sweeps, so long as no
_________
10immoderation tears them
loose, bar off a middle ground
for ordinary happiness’s
strawberry plants, say (subject
to frost), whereas no body
15bears (can it?) the hum of
undeviating happiness any
more than a constancy of
blithe cold: ups and downs
work out a way of showing up
20from down as well as an
interregnum of nonchalance:
I’m impressed with the way
things work, work
itself setting up mid-regions
25of rest, whereas (again) rest,
what can become of rest,
more rest?, so much rest
edging restlessness up: if
I were to make a moral
30of this, I’d say that
if you have something to go
along with, go along with
it, because millions of goings
and comings before us have
35smoothed and ruffled balancing
grooves, the groove itself,
_________
so hard to find, a turning
back of going in—a puzzlingly
remarkable territory to greet.
1986 (1996)
Reasoning Power
Sometime between thaws, blows, and freezes,
a sawtoothed leaf became seamlessly sealed
in ice but now, a long thaw underway, it lies
disclosed on the surface, surface having
5inched in to it: who’s to say as I tell you
this that the brookful of ice, honeycombed
with lattices, worked sucked-through with
holes that underspin overpouring and downchurning
water is going on with its work and that I
10am holding alone here looking at held leaves
and lattices for a reason: do I need
reason to tell the reason: would one wandering
this way be dwelling in the strong offices of
reason or would he, nonreasoning, be looking
15for the indifference of the sawtooth edge that
softens as it gets out of ice and dries brittle
in a wind that shows it a new home, dissolution
its destination: merely, merely, merely naked
in the shrunken spine turned away from rejection:
20does one need to say that in the abundance
of nothing a leaf surprises the mind full of
_________
design, bilateral symmetry in asymmetry, that
these minds unoccupied with the given hold such
starvations of emptiness available, any bit of
25action, a leaf turning
over in the wind,
can become what is.
Tenacities
Shrinking back for coherence’s holding
gauge, closing in, we
came not to dust but to
a mode or condition, nothingness,
5where smallness, looked into, grew vast:
we found the beam the mind
construes between nothing and nothing,
from which it seems intolerable to move
either way: we said must we
10give up the hope of forms not yet seen:
we stepped back out into the open where
roses blacken in sleet or, given up too far, spill apart.
1969
Blues in the Valley
Route 96B has lain over there
bending up and away over the
ridge on its way out,
going out day and night,
_________
5while I’ve been here valley-bound
31 years and got so
I think I can hear
singing in the rocks, riffles,
the cool dream-reels
10of boulders:
light bands near sundown
break out
underpinning the clouds on west hill,
and I know how
15they’ve looked before, may look again,
how they’ll thin down and fine away.
1977 (1993)
Packaging
Roll
up the edges of
the squared-off, flattened-out,
two-dimensional
5mind,
pull the corners up and tie them
off at the top,
a sphere or bag, so that
anyone thinking
10will
have to think about more sides
at once than one,
get volume
within his
15definitions,
_________
and become less secure
that summer with him is
summer everywhere,
his ice cap feeling’s
20only leaning.
1974
Serpent Country
Rolled off a side of mountains or
hills, bottomed
out in flatland but getting
away, winding,
5will be found a
scale-bright snake—brook, stream, or river, or,
in sparest gatherings,
a wash of stones or a green
streak of chaparral across sand.
1982 (1983)
Early Stones
Returning from the thawed creek
and winter-hungry for early
slugs or mole crickets, he
turns a stone on
5the clear-woods floor, thinks to
pick it up, steadying his pace
back to the cave porch where
he drops it,
an investment against the fireless
10summer nights when the tiger
moves too near in, hard to scare.
Connecting Misses
Pursue a subject, it flares
into division,
branches raveling, blurring
off, networks splitting
5ramification till
splintering fines: or
some mountain, perhaps,
offering a tunnel with little view,
interrupts, straightening the
10lessening: still,
no matter
how slight, subjects
get whole attentions
to be in: when
15the subject runs out leaving
everything oceanic and still
undone will the world have
disappeared, too, or
will we light out
20across sea-swings, savannahs,
brambles, woodlots,
with a clear line that
cuts a new subject free to a
world’s pursuing?
Evasive Actions
Poems are forms of protective coloration by which
a person insecure in his true colors takes trial
stances of coloration to imitate true colors or to
baffle detection, either by simple baffling or by
5adopting disguise of common conventions or to
direct attention from his differences by putting
_________
on the unconventional act, seeming to be normal by
open and flagrant imitation of the abnormal: how
is one to become invisible at times except by the
10gaudiest announcements of visibility or how is one
to hide the truth except by the blinding of
truth on truth: how is one to put off
encounter except by puzzling the terms of encounter
past inquiry: poems, poems, how they sail!
15catching sight up like a knowledge of enemies and
carrying it away under the pleasances of flight,
a riddance: or poems hold the attention of
others till they have no will of their own, lost,
enchanted, and with the impression that it is sweet
20to be spelled lost: what shams, displays, fireworks
to throw scent off by sweet scent: what humbling
and pleading by the pitiful poet as he leads others
into the marshes of nonpursuit: not to be found out,
so many poems left behind to be found: poems
25say, bind yourself to me in the fidelities of
sameness, or in the trustworthy semblance of sameness,
a bond of friends: meanwhile, the true work is done.
1982 (1986)
Tenure’s Pleasures
Plenty of the young dropped
this morning when the rain
iced a quarter inch jewel-hard
on the walkways,
_________
5but the supple young rose
(and some dropped and rose again)
unharmed:
here and there an old professor,
though, hit the pack and as
10he stirred files rattled in insurance
suites and big money moved
dangerously: fortunately, far
off in Michigan, a plane’s
wings iced over, too, and
15the novelist scheduled to
read here this afternoon
canceled and now, so wonderful
the variety of possibility,
we can all go on home early
20to liniment our bruises or watch
the fissures swell—it’s swell.
(1987)
Pressing On
Over the rise they find significance behind
them, and the significance of coming down
even again next to nothing: love was the deep
valuable now buried under the rise memory can
5hardly plunder to resurrect, at times, and
given the pains of closing out ahead, a kind
_________
of floating eases through; they have no
reality to settle to worthwhile: but free
enough to float! the work done, the children
10schooled, the mortgage burned, long-term
insurance in place: the blood of memory thins,
pain shears entanglements away, the floating
ranges out becoming dreams: when they try to touch
down the ground under them flows.
The Story
Oblivion keeps the caterpillar bright.
Period
One gets started
conditionally perhaps
or
introductorily
5and after
a ceremony or so of
pause and
preparation
rises into the main
10business,
strikes a couple
of dashing heights—
breathless—
followed by
15parentheses picking
up and holding
back
but then drops
a semicolon
20(giving serious
notice); but
coordinating away,
though, as if
into a new beginning,
25tensions knitting
newly into rise,
ramification
and wandering having
blurred
30outcome, when closure
arrives as
usual punctual
with a rest.
(1993)
The Way of One’s Desire
One not lost finds no way:
terror brightens what it sees:
home’s a destination one
departs with to part with:
5okay never looks to be okay,
and not-okay, looking, sees
the only not-okay: you who
know, even as if not knowing,
tell me, how does one err
10to find one’s erring: where
that school the way back home?
Hurricane
Migrating along (butterfly-like,
actually) I came on
a sweeping system, round
and big, and traveling with it
5forgot it was not
I (a magnificent loss for that
much gain) but the system played
out in time, dissipating
into severally estranged
10motions and, an edged-out
peripheral bit myself, I dropped
dashed to a breaking
shoal and fluttered bedazzled
with separation
15but also with—what a relief.
The Crystal Tree
May we tinker with nature, define &
adopt, adjust her procedures, till
we can make a nature
that unwinds us at last from
5the coils of nature: but
giving ourselves over in the
admiration of study, measuring
the delicacies of balance,
the fineries of difference,
_________
10how may we get free enough
not to think ourselves
sacrilegious in overturning
