The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2
Page 35
coaster, jet liner) I’m going to do plenty
and say so: I’m not going to bust around
fluffing and flubbing as if there were no items
5to itemize, clumps to stack, deeds to deal:
I’m going to refer to and realize lofty images
(still playing them down)—such as the golf
tee of nothingness at the central spin
of mixing coordinations: profusion, profusion is
_________
10all and where possible (and even along with
lean necessities and little words) we ought to
have some, since not to have any may be
no more than the opposite choice: how
nervous to starve (and let others sink sunk-eyed)
15on terms: when I find my new
shape (friendly, grist-hungry means) opulence
is going to perk out of jugs, hark in
hampers heaping high, and furnish stars additions.
1975
Standing on the Corner Watching All the Wheels Go By
In a time of big cars, a small car raises eyebrows:
this law, lowly derived, is as high as any other sky:
contempt, amusement, curiosity: but if then the cars
switched, big to small, the law would remain the same:
5another law, older than Kepler: (trilliums by the
trillion whitened the slopes broken down by brooks,
I noticed the other day as I rode in my car, small, as
it happened): I don’t know: I just have a few words
to say: it’s not my world, no: even though it is
10the only world and, so, mine or not, mine, and I’d
better start taking the seriousness of it seriously
and taking responsibility for what becomes of it: well,
but what becomes of it can never be mine, never
approve my approvals, never affirm my root causes
15and dreams but, quite beside the point, can poison and
_________
parch my lacy innards, hard dry burnt ridges of good
stuff bleached weird, unearthly: so, not my earth, even,
which proceeds mainly by codes, pairings, nestings
I stand by and wonder at: too old a story to pity:
20when the small car is the driving force of emotional
clustering, yea, when all the big cars are subsumed
in their similitude by the striking of a smallish difference,
more room’s there for possibility than for pity: I
suppose this is doubletalk, vacuous wheezing on with
25too little material substructure out of which under
other circumstance other sorts of flaring might
have flared: can one be lucky to be on the curb?
1993
Home Place
for G. P. E.
I’m walking with a friend
on his stony road
by Hatch Lake:
my son, six, is with us
5and wants to race:
he knows we’re old
and he could win: but what,
I think, if I have a heart
attack and hit
10the ground: or
what if my friend does:
well, the sky’s the same
_________
here as anywhere: these are
universal trees: and stones,
15nudged, roll down these banks:
okeydokey, I say: on your mark.
1972
Postmodernist Views
I’m tired of looking at this old siding:
I’ve painted peeled patches winter
after winter till it’s twelve shades of
white: when I walk around outside,
5years light up in special collections,
flat flickers as from a churning mobile:
I’m going to call up and get a quick
estimate: I’m going to consider
color: I may try aluminum: or vinyl:
10why not dye each side a different mauve
topped off with a prismatic roof:
maybe just hang with the patchy hues.
Expropriations
If you’ve
told somebody
once you
don’t have
5it still
to tell:
as the
mass of
your tellings
10increases so
does the
scope of
your emptiness:
when perfectly
15expressed you
are in
the plenitude
of speechlessness,
the wisdom
20of not
a stir
to start,
not a
move’s arc
25to inscribe:
then the
bird sings
to your
whole world,
30bone to
blue, singly.
Nitty Gritty
If one can’t be
somewhat impure
in his motives
(let principle
5decay into circumstance,
wash multiple)
how can he
crack
light into
_________
10color, energizing
twinge, perspectival
warp, or
focus condensation
to a boil: the
15slicing edge of
bitsy imperfection
gives colloidal
reflection to the flow,
point to
20rise,
division to thorough bass.
1975
Enfield Falls
I don’t understand why the stream
before the falls over by Enfield
reminds me of my own going through
things when it narrows to
5a pass and sinks moiling through
a foot-wide sluice where the water’s
so fast the banks back up: that
coming to a necessity, like being
born or dying or getting to the
10dentist, that tensing and speeding
up, turbulence, and then the
opening out on the other side, easing
_________
up, turning into sheets mist-thin
falling, air’s weight, over
15the fall’s edge: I don’t know
why this is and is not like things
I’ve felt: they say nature is almost
contemptuously beneath me now, I’m so
separate, my destiny so different
20from water’s, and I agree, at least, in
part, but also I don’t understand why
what I have to take on, tense to, seems
easier, clearer, and more to be expected
just because water expresses motions
25that look like my emotions: if
we could be a little at home here! . . .
racing, falling, easing away.
1988 (1989)
The Many Ways Not Supreme
I didn’t look for what I couldn’t have borne to find,
I never looked, into a face where might be a face
I’d wholly wish, hands and fingertips, to
touch and trace, to hold in an instant eternal
5forms an eternity of change could only affirm: no,
I might have seen and then what else might
my eyes have found to see: as it’s been I’ve
watched faces flare, pass, flicker, or turn but nowhere
_________
held still to that still face, adoration’s feast:
10the grave’s lid can’t close away the never known:
I’ll take with me the blank eternity will leave from
then on blank, the unfound eye lively in m
y love’s light.
(1993)
Sojourning
I can see almost
as high as the Way
but not as high:
the Way too
5high to see, though,
is only the high
Way: lesser ways
tangle at
times with time,
10sway visibly—
foxgrape vines,
petunias—move
into recalcitrances,
boulders, but
15up there
the radiance paints
no eager eye:
life’s broken, low-down,
shadow-hardened, roar
20and rot its
way through.
Death and Silhouettes
Harassed with inquiry, I
waited up by a scale-flaked
boulder in a willow glen,
the pond there such glass
5insects’ dips riffled it
whole:
suppose the end gusts through
here someday, though,
I said. . . .
10so let whatever is in being
meaning to be said out be said
unless this is where
saying gives meaning up,
the heart
15airtight with perfection,
time come round at last:
glow
near dusk melted the pines,
the moonbridge’s shadow
20stone-stable
in water: may
the whole be touched
to push things on
after heart’s-ease once? . . .
25when a gull struck
the pond and lifted away
a minnow’s whole absence.
(1993)
Fall’s End
Glassy rain on the roads
and day melting down:
the bony hedges ink up,
tip-end inscriptions as if
5scribbling out of here:
this prison is round,
the soul says, dusk
rounding into dusk:
the horizon’s too gray
10to part from the hills and,
now, the mist is too
fine to shiver
the puddles: remember broad
daylight: a redbird pitches
15flickers in the shrubs,
a color beyond belief.
(1987)
A Part for the Whole
Feet burl up (knobs
knoll) peel, laminations
pleat and pleat against
wear, cushion
5into calluses:
arches bone-sprung crack flat,
_________
skin spins hard
(knit-whirls) into
thorns; the heelstring’s
10heelbone-hold
parches dry, itching
needles
to stitch pain’s threads in:
what am I to do,
15old feet: I
need you: wherever I’ve
ever been (jails) you’ve
walked me right out of there:
thick wide toenails
20harden and slice
toe-meat: arthritis sucks
bone-mesh crunchy:
diabetic sores seeding
gangrene enflame
25pus sacs: feet, good feet,
don’t leave me up here with
the one place to go
and no way to keep from going.
1989
Lofty Calling
Chimney-top, aerial- or cherry-tree-top,
Bob Shorter’s mockingbird
splits daybreak to air-light glint glass,
chips slabs superfine, bubbles and pops
5blisters, chisels light to pane-flint floats:
he wangles crescendos up from
cedar roots and sprays improvisations
into as many song-tips as cedar tips:
then with stark repetition
10hacks a few cedars down:
he works at it—air’s tilled over Bob’s
place, tone-farmed: and then
at times, as if restless with stodgy air,
Shorter’s mockingbird gets
15the leaps and leaps on song swells
and settles down again as if into
buoys of his own music:
line and formation apprise the air;
invention on invention piled up
20figure the invisible invisibly.
1974 (1989)
Weightlessness
Boulders high-lying
aside the woods’
ridge compress
light: if the light
5sprang out of them
they would be husks,
_________
foggy crusts: where
dreams rise
to the hemlocks have
10resettled, within each
green a golden
form: nature
comes back from
transcendences, rounding
15out the motions’
necessary rondures:
here in stump-meal
the worm parades.
(1989)
Rosy Transients
A wretchedness will come with an improvement, like as not,
just as, on some occasions, a bright morning will be
bitter windy, the weeklong cover having at least held warmth in:
the balances of mix’s interpenetrations are subtle enough
5to add up to or derive from consistent gray but because the gray shades
off into hues and because some hues statistically bend banding together
away at intervals reinforcing one another, some days are brighter
than others and as relief from dark oncomings bright dwellings
more or less reside: but this variety!—your
10biggest winnings could become too much wealth to care for
(and nothing else to do), as your greatest happiness
could drag you to surgery and a big-eyed abortion: and
anxiety, on the other hand, that strings your striations up and flails
them dry, can reorder your priorities: getting away
15with something—no, the strictures and self-strictures are thicker
_________
than the liberties, but with a pittance you can get away, the price
tag attached, no discount applying, and no hidden weapon: all
men are equal, or nearly so, in these just systems dull as dust.
1982 (1986)
The Incomplete Life
At the extreme
tip of
the future is
death, of course,
5and short
of that something not
much like life,
a careless caring
and pain perhaps
10one’s
ceasing ceases: an
experience whose
experience shuts
experience down:
15at the
moment one has
the whole world’s way to
say one
is beyond words,
20just words,
just beyond words.
(1988)
Chosen Roads
A snatch of crabgrass broken through a crack in the blacktop,
suddenly a watery-bright earthworm flips out whole into the
midafternoon sun and hitting the scorched macadam dances
in loops across six blistering inches to the margin’s shade
5and ground, when another follows flashing into the light but
strikes out at a longer angle for the edge and stretches one
end to the shade, not before the other sticks to the starved
heat and dies: the safe end wrestles tugging this way and
that to get loose but the burnt end, hard dry, holds.
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(1992)
Summer Place
The ocean will grind, yea or nay, the sky gape,
spiders will shake their lines, and cuneiform will
become photooffset or something or nothing: when
you consider the wreckage expectation and delivery
5will wreak on each of us, though, it’s a good thing,
probably, that other things and people won’t care
about us as much as we do, thus moderating our own
cataclysmic perspectives: when I go, I shake the
universe I know loose: that this shakes me
10more than the universe is some comfort, about all
I’m likely to get: everything that isn’t trivial
could be made so: that would help keep things down:
my last fallacy of imitative form, my book on
roundness, disappointed me some (oh, yes, it did), I meant
15to write one unreadable, but a lot of people have
_________
bought it, reading it or not: I wanted something