The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2

by A. R. Ammons

  twigs nearly miss to catch

  mist and drops

  _________

  can’t get big enough to

  10dangle from some limbs.

  Safe

  I’ve hidden my desire over the wall under

  a pile of stones the morning glory

  never breaks out of (no white thread looking

  that far through turned and darkened country)

  5and nothing ever comes in to:

  so, possessed as the wind, I shake around a wider

  country now, my paper-panther kite eyes

  burning the leaves off trees with seeing and

  rattling, brilliant, storming roots up into weeds:

  10stone held, I’m safe at last in vision.

  1965

  Reading Ta’o Chien

  Often I go out year-early

  to the caterpillars’ tents

  hardly aweb enough in the branches

  to notice,

  5and plunge a stick into

  the core-squirm and,

  twisting it, dip out a knapsack

  bolus and chucking stick and

  worms over the hedge say

  10well, little scribblers,

  let’s see you rewrite that:

  this year, though, I’m—why I

  _________

  don’t know—so different, I pass

  the cherry already an upright

  15lake cloudy with sail

  and say to the late caterpillars

  though they hardly listen

  (at least, they don’t reply)

  what nice sentences!

  20the leaves sprout, the caterpillars

  as tender as they, and both

  purplish green: following the ravage,

  for backup there’ll be some new branches,

  a second growth of leaves.

  1979

  Geezerly

  I stoop to slip a long

  twig under the earthworm

  drowning white in

  the blacktop rainpool

  5so as to tote it

  safe to the lawn’s edge:

  the worm loosens,

  slack as the breathless

  water but, nudged,

  10firms and lengthens

  slender, needling for

  soil: I can’t

  get down close enough

  to work the twig under:

  15I’m too rickety to squat; too

  _________

  brittle to stretch out

  alongside: and

  it’s way too far to fall.

  An Improvisation for Soot and Suet

  The pebble

  fidgeted by freshets,

  mouthed by

  trout,

  5buried under bank shoals,

  cleared risen by a falling tree’s roots,

  repossessed crinkled lacy by moss . . .

  takes on the rondure

  of attack from anywhere,

  10its history its loss,

  surface events declared

  by vanishing,

  history what’s

  left to tell what left

  (1991)

  An Improvisation for the Killers of Meat

  The fat will let you weaken

  before it will give in,

  dissolve off into circulation

  (resolution outmelts fat)

  5the liver comes between

  to cushion,

  absorb quick feed or

  lingeringly to release held goods:

  the guts dwell slowly

  10on a big feed

  holding it back for the membranes

  to nibbling polish away

  or rush a small order through to

  appease the responsive liver:

  15the fat resides

  behind layers of

  negotiation: you can’t

  flake it off, its

  purpose to hold out and hold on,

  20bridging broad privations:

  fat: first it is a sheet, then

  a blanket, then pillow and bed

  of pillows in which the empty stomach blinks

  Reckless Endangerment

  Black, red, gold, green-speckled leaves

  mingle spotty on the same maple:

  neighbors not seen all summer show

  through the hedge: what

  5are they doing—raking leaves,

  gliding sheets down billowless,

  hefting airy armloads off to winded heaps:

  what they’re doing looks brighter

  than the sweaty drudgery over here:

  10tools,

  faces cleared this way

  to view, though, someone could speak right

  _________

  through the hedge, yard to yard,

  and crack the summer’s privacy wide open.

  1984

  Swimming Night

  A train rumbles through the valley before day

  and I think it at first a deep constancy storm wind

  is rising and falling from but then the

  whistle toots human signs and I try to pick out

  5roars, the wind’s from the train’s, but they

  interchange or gusts tear up with a blanking

  loudness I can feel the cedars tugging and whipping in.

  Then trucktrailers whine like mosquitoes on the turnpike,

  their brakes squealing at the light up by the airport.

  1984

  Ontology Precedes Teleology

  Appearances, undwellings, are shunted

  aside, the come-and-gone debris

  of the lasting, but, think of it, out

  of the curvatures of time’s plumbings, to

  5appear, be someone, in a where, a bit

  planet in a furrow of a flimsy

  galaxy, to show up

  or show others up, endure being

  shown up—just the flash

  10on the edge of time that cuts

  _________

  things loose: to be present in the very

  moment of emergence of what

  is, spring moths or budsprouts or

  peripheral novae or slur forms

  15ambling deep reaches: like that:

  whereas we could love the lasting only

  if it kept the present, which it

  doesn’t, but turns in and out of itself

  until it turns free of weight

  20and shadow and becomes no more than

  the turning in and out of its turning,

  motion lost at last to a high undoing.

  1985 (1989)

  Disclaimer

  A downpour, thunder-sudden and quit, rattled

  then hummed the roof last night, but the woods,

  so dry, soaked it up, the brook this

  morning still a shimmer in silence: you can have

  5poetry in our time if there’s no poetry in it, a

  voice if it speaks without a voice: you can

  have the world if you will have none of it and

  honor if you can’t see honor:

  you can have wisdom if one

  10among the

  clowns and looters, gigglers and angry castaways

  will speak: flashy water travels

  _________

  white over stone, the hard soft-worn,

  but give up brook glitter and

  15the high world that shines immortal betides.

  1993

  Spike-Tooth Harrows

  We might, rather than lament nothingness,

  make nothing of more things, ailments,

  blunting the pain also of the differences

  farthest from nothing, the tribulations,

  5shakedowns of self, forced competitions,

  stagefrights we undergo without support

  or wondering what the support

  is, pills or terrestrial or

  celestial friends: I long for a high

  10friend u
nfailing, for I have not met here

  one who will not forsake—

  whereas the celestial friend,

  also, needn’t be bedded down over the

  weekend or awakened in a funk, or

  15lent money to, or encouraged himself,

  but is constant, constant as nothingness

  which we should not so much lament

  as take to its wide ease,

  a welcoming unsurroundable in expanse,

  20a quality of constancy beyond misfire; and

  especially if there’s nothing in us to betray,

  no false structures, frail

  arrogances to prop up, nothingness may

  be, one to one, the very grail we quest.

  (1992)

  Picking Where Out of When

  Waiting’s sometimes the most important element

  in winning: for example,

  suppose you decided to haul away

  the pines’ pollen cones:

  5you could get tuckered plucking, sifting,

  break your knee slipping off risk-lengthened

  ladders, stifle yourself with riled powder:

  relax a couple of weeks, the cones clear off:

  they may to an early thunderstorm even gold-fringe

  10puddles with dense flotillas and, afterwards,

  dry into rings’ finest meshings: so many things

  left to themselves take care of themselves:

  I know a man, though, who picked out his gravesite

  and stone, priced the laying away, affixed

  15the stark period to his days, then

  leaned back into every sine curve, swerve, coordinated

  loop and swing of the grammar and loft of his sentence:

  some things, a few, left to themselves,

  needlessly prolong puzzling blurs.

  1979

  Odysseus for Eva Maria Rodtwitt

  Tying one to

  one to

  make one

  and one to one

  5to make

  another

  _________

  and tying the

  one to

  the other

  10to make one,

  soon

  the design or

  weave takes

  the view

  15and takes

  precedence till

  the sharp flint

  bit

  untyable remains

  20that slits the

  loops loose

  so one can

  tie one to one

  to make one.

  1974

  High Desiring

  Though not the savior wished,

  oblivion saves:

  rememberers disperse, and

  the grave, neutral as a moon,

  5rides in no difference

  image or word can make:

  _________

  united, indeed, at last—grave,

  earth, father, child—there is

  no further use, no scalded

  10eye, but the sweet of no

  sweet at all, the perpetual song

  words and music troubled a while.

  (1987)

  The Damned

  This fellow grazed his woolly goats

  on a high ledge, a very high place

  snowless in summer, but it was,

  perhaps because of the fellow’s loneliness,

  5a region in which the mountains talked,

  it seemed, and over a miles-wide gulf,

  summits forever white rose useless

  in august assumptions the polish of

  the wind and glare of the sun sanctified,

  10the fellow supposed, and he thought,

  well, few know that kind of thing,

  a rare condition, though not good for grass:

  and the fellow, noting that the peaks

  had really said nothing yet, went to

  15the ledge-edge and looked down on the

  summits of sweet-green hills

  and runoff rills so lowly and supposed,

  again, that these damned came of being

  _________

  near the sanctified, wherever one finds

  20one one finds the other, and he wondered

  if the heights knew, somehow, that the energy

  of their complacency came of

  a differentiation imposed on the backs,

  so to speak, of the lowly, and he

  25wondered if the sanctified would not

  wish to remove themselves, somehow, if

  they knew that, but then, he supposed,

  knowing that would spoil the sanctification

  anyhow, so maybe the peaks could shine

  30there, since it seemed they had to, as

  wastelands of what it means to be way high:

  but the mountains had said nothing and

  the fellow supposed himself a supposition,

  too, no one having agreed with him, the peaks

  35too taken aback, except for this longing

  for the valleys luxuriant in his depths.

  (1988)

  What Was That Again

  If out in

  the desert

  we

  trim the

  5billies will

  the kidless

  nannies die back

  and absence

  thin out

  _________

  10starvation,

  and will

  grass take hold

  round ungrazed

  dunes

  15and rise

  closing off the

  dunes like eyelids,

  and will

  brushwoods sprinkle

  20and flow into

  the goatless hollows

  streams can

  arrive

  shining in?

  (1988)

  Prisons There and Not

  A feeling of transparency like freedom

  accompanies choosing for oneself

  what society chooses one to

  choose: the ambience clears of brierworks,

  5and entanglements and the shades lofty

  boughs catch from one another

  become intangible with breeze: the DNA

  puts its full intricacy behind one’s doing

  its calling, a boost uphill feeling

  10downhill: cleared spaces bigger

  _________

  than fields open up around one and roads

  run with one river-wide away

  any way one turns: it’s really

  nice: fail to get off on the right

  15foot and have to turn aside for a cure

  for having had to turn aside, though, one

  causes, inadvertently, of course, delay

  (ditches of delay running frittering systems

  along those free ways) and misses dinner, picks

  20up a bug at the doctor’s, finds, shortly,

  one’s desires nibbling away at accepted

  practices: one wants to get free of

  hindrances so one can get on with it, but

  society isn’t interested in hindrances, as

  25such: mixture, encouraging obscurity

  of view, befalls, and one must devote

  one’s energy to re-addressing the clarifications

  missed out on long ago: seeking to make way

  through spent darkness, one construes a light

  30alternative to the light and begins to prefer its

  small allowance as an opening, at least, or

  something more like room than one had found before:

  one’s free choice then leads to a freedom not free,

  but to a freedom free only following victory

  _________

  35over the freedom one originally fell out

  with, meaning war: minority wars are hard

  on individuals who even when they make right

  minority choices live with their fe
llows

  shadowed by a reality they’re the exception

  40to: out of step, singled out, working as if as

  usual in unusual frames, one cuts back

  on preparation, aspiration, the dream of every

  possibility: the branches of all this loss

  heap up around one as a stricture: okay,

  45there is no help for this: one chooses to act

  freely, openly: now and then one may

  derive an instant’s illusion of the freedom

  missed, and tears may hollow out one’s hollow cell.

  1985 (1993)

  Moving Figures

  Actuality surges,

  swerves

  into edges of

  definition

  5or, vagrant, softens

  and

  parts or

  stands

  _________

  weightily awaiting

  10somewhere to