by A. R. Ammons
dynamisms so spelled out
into spellings of our own
15slightly askew: some of us
may study and admire, even praise,
perhaps, while others assume
the lofty scantlings of
arrogance and twist
20the workings our way, forcing
our ends: and our ends, that
we may not die, or that we
may build what keeping itself
perfect cannot die, glass
25intelligences freed at last
to roam immortal ranges
out there: not to die,
this the will arisen on an orb’s skin
where death’s transmission’s
30nearest absolute, a
single victory from it our
widest claim: but if it is
not the end of matter to make
good people or people good,
35we may envision the fierce
laying nature waste
that brought death in
and we may conquer and
rebuild till nature,
_________
40against itself, supports
the eternal life it
never would allow, though
it let the will arise,
disguised and mute at first,
45then bespoken as by one
exceeding his standing,
varying his way,
commanding: this one
is coming up among us, his
50demand answering,
to balance our fall,
even if to the end of
the human,
beginning another unknown.
1982 (1993)
A Pretty Looking Sight
I suppose we must act as if—
though some old man
is turning windless in a room—
language is too strict
5to pay a visit,
to slouch loose out of tense indifference
and go over there
and say something to the old man
or for him:
10after all, pretty soon he
won’t be winded anymore:
then where would poetry be
_________
with no place to go
calling: but if it doesn’t
15go through one mouth, enter
ears, and go out some other
mouth, how will it keep
rigorous, straitened up
into shape: oh, well, real
20height, carelessness, mounts so
sharply up words probably
strip out
of its wires and the wires,
climbing, probably
25melt to light, and at the pinnacle
where this world could be stood
is a sort of place, highly
designated, and empty.
(1983)
Focus
Fellow down the street
(it’s like flocculation)
throws a party and
Cadillacs (and
5a Mark Continental or
so) assemble
lining all eight sides
of the crossing he
corners on
_________
10as if an old Cadillac
had died or two young were
marrying: other places
you see half-shamed,
sullenly-arrogant foreign
15cars hugging into
clusters or, other
places, mixed bags
like university people’s
(1979)
God Is the Sense the World Makes Without God
Every year the hydrangea grows so
big its white brains, lobed nodes,
flop over all around the rim to
the first stormburst, leaving midbush
5stem-arching open space: and then
the white booms, sprinkled weighty
by rain, turn green down near the ground,
splintery petal-balls: going high lofts
more substance than height assumes or holds.
Painlessness, to Pain, Is Paradise
Does he know enough to know what it’s like
to have been here: has he seen enough
to give seeing up: clouds, he’s waited with white
October clouds like these often before
_________
5but when one white cloud shades another
gray, has he ever noticed that: and though he’s
studied many falls’ mottled casts, has he plucked
the wires of vines frost skins leaf-free: scrawny
notes! is more missing than was never enough:
10he’s certain certain loves absolve and heal in
passing rapids or welling stirs: but if he hasn’t
done and seen enough to go, going itself may
pick up marks of rounding back to the beginning
where on the trek out who knows what perspectives
15may improve or fall away and, last minute instruction,
a glassy light and, beyond, within that, dimly a brighter.
1985
Flaws in Dominance
Curious (or not at all) that now
we flash
language around the globe, our poets
retreat from speaking: they break
5up and strew, smallen or blur oblique:
taking every brush pile, river
bend, scorched field into account
rives any sweeping account ragged,
peels any assertion into skinny
10stripping: sects, tribes, pressure
and splinter groups assemble point,
partialities of definition, daring:
_________
they know a place to get to and head
out: so is there any way or use
15to address a level above all
or above number one and what notch
below the supreme receives any
message kindly right: rounded, we’re
enwound: the engines of fragmentation
20mean to cure themselves into
broad equivalences by destruction
and incorporation, whereas the languid
irresolution of world views (except
for negligible cells, pockets here
25and there) breeds bumfuzzlement’s
indirection: which are we more likely
to survive, the circumambient graces
of utter peace or the shiny-red
edges of anger and retribution: should
30any voice rise to poise all hopes?
How Things Go Wrong
One person short-cuts across the lawn because
a new building is being added to the complex,
changing everything,
and his shoes press the grass over so
5another walker sees a way already waged, and
pretty soon the root texture, like linen,
loosens on the ground, worn through: rain
puddles in a heelprint so walkers walk
around, broadening direction’s swath: more
_________
10rain widens the mud so that given the picky waywardness
of walkers one could soon drive a chariot
right down the middle of recent developments.
Eternity’s Taciturnity
It’s so hard to tell what’s missing: you can’t
see by what is there: so little is there
that most of the time most everything is missing,
anyhow, intended or not: but all the missing is
5easily missed because what is there, little as
it is, fills up the whole sight, blinding away
everything absent: and you can’t tell what is
missing because absence leaves no trace: anyway,
I don’t say anything about Rome or the architecture
10of
the Palatine: I say nothing about the Bavarian;
pre- or post-Christian; bureaucracies,
wars, canons, bloody murderers: in
fact, history which gives us the only identity we
have is so terrifying a tale I’d just as soon
15wipe it out and keep trying to start over:
if I were to mention anyone, I’d mention old
Enkidu to whom I am unnaturally attracted; probably,
not Gilgamesh, he was so fretful: I almost never
say a word about where I came from: I left there:
20please, when you see the little I have, try to
imagine what I’ve left out: I meant to leave it out.
1993
Killing Stuff Off
These geese flying over now will be late
geese, the territories north already split
up and claimed: they’ll have to fly
farther (north, north) till lichen’s
5the ground brush and chill never leaves the
nest: I wonder if geese do go that far,
lay eggs in frizzled moss and shrivel through
cold summers: geese mostly squabble over
at about the right time, error kept low by high
10mortality among the very early and late: the
extremes are costly as usual, I’m afraid, even if
that’s where persistency’s invention cuts
most sharply new, necessity permafrost:
but there’s no use to worry; things shape
15themselves: still, in the short run, when
I hear geese going over this late, my heart
swerves, my throat jumps, late, late.
Boon
I put my head
down low
finally and said
where then do I
5belong: your
belonging
_________
is to belong nowhere:
what am I
to be:
10your being is to be
about to be:
what am I to
do: show
what doing comes to:
15thank
you
for this office,
this use.
1988 (1988)
Downstream
It’s a clear case with rivers: they
go on with the ongoing:
otherwise, darters headed upstream
would have no currency to keep true in:
5parasites and speckled snails on
struck fronds or unshucked coconuts
wouldn’t float to colonizations elsewhere:
riverweeds on wharf legs would flop sail-dull,
not dancing to point where the action went.
Ruin’s the Palace of Commencement
Let the rousers through: I held on and
kept still; life, the unsettling possibility,
skittered by me: plow up the garden rows;
fury frolics: roll cornerstones, harrowing
5hills: keep nothing recollection
sticks to: lust and vengeance start
fresh: shun libraries, retreats, the long
seminars of comprehending: greed already
understands perfectly: standing still this
10way in the way of myself, I prevent what
I endorse, the letting out, the letting go,
the hour whose explosion fills to complete its time.
Holding Heights
Leaves evidentiary, branches
principles, trunk or stock
unity of source, the bush’s shape’s
elaboration’s quick single, summary
5like a feeling: underground, the radical
linkage provides ramification into
invisible foundation:
but the ground in all cases
prevails, taproot or desert-weed smokeroot.
Walking About in the Evening
The brook’s slab-gray dry except
for flickers at a sloped slate’s
narrows: all this gold, though a man just
down the street died young today:
_________
5I think to chasten the brook,
its diddle-flickers too brilliant
catching sundown, that it run smooth or
bend evenly for a change: but brooks
pay no mind: and, anyway,
10maybe the flickering shells out a magic
that will spell this man over millennia
back to a perfect reconstitution in light.
1979 (1979)
Museums
The brook, running dry, will stop running, dry:
(it worms now like a lost rope down the slate roughs,
but it wrestles bank stones harshly after
downpours): slowed, it clears skinny dusk mirrors
5with overhangs of branches that shade through
the stone bed into sky: the brook doesn’t represent
beauty: it tears off a piece of shore moss, the soggy, threaded
bottom dangling in a strip: it sorts spill down ledges,
wears what it wears away, arcs in ice-like fangs or, skimming,
10idles scum-floats: it doesn’t fall apart representing
style: it means nothing but a sum of forces reacting
along a line to a sum of forces from whose sums the mind
makes up a day’s subtractions, recollections: nothing
keeps it or wraps or hangs it up: but keep this
15poem, this reminder not of keeping but of not keeping.
(1991)
Second-Rate Perfection
Poorly-made people
burning accuracy alive
make the best verses:
those they make them
5for are
away on missions words
play indifferent parts in:
the lame invent walking,
and the blind know
10light’s possibilities:
instinct seldom prowls
through to dumb
fulfillment: words are
briers to eat: in time,
15the mouth no longer bleeds.
1981 (1990)
The Planet That Was There
The snowflake knows
nothing, of course,
but for all it
knows, it could,
5loosened from the blue
bottom of a cloud, drift
to the planet’s
center,
_________
except that willow withes
10or tall brush or even
grass or bog-sphagnum
interrupt, and the so-long
journey that started
out
15touches down, spending
its way at once,
flicks of momentum lying
about in mounds and lees.
1993
Terebene Scene
There being nothing left to tell,
one begins to speak up, curls and wisps
of interest, figurations, nest-like bits
and integrations set aside, for it’s
5not speaking the speakable, though
that can form grace or warp, but speaking
what can be said on the way to the
unspoken unspeakable—the place too deep
to plunder or else just a place cleared
10off: the differences fall into
shimmering stations and stalls of gradation
back away from that well of difference,
indifference: from that well one drinks
the numb cold or lukewarm till not
15cold or lukewarm, an intermediacy
_________
appears whose balance wipes it out and then
nothing’s there, and any fringe
incipience, floret, fury is
a grits-grain in starvation, the
20marbling of lean in wh
iteside grease:
won’t a theory be steered away from
its drive if bent in self-shade, forced
to serve formation not its own: but
what vine in fact gets through uncompromised,
25curling—if one tries for the impossible,
no variant of the possible’s left out, a prior
screening: people parties of one have
this philosophy, one person peripheral
could be the central one, oneself, so major
30motions one ought to approve in the
population leave frail eddies of objection
around, not of the main flow, niggling
discomfitures, quailing critiques.
Rain Gauges
The fine branch twigs
are zipped noded
underneath with fine drops
and the big branch
5twigs with big glassy
drops, but the finest
