by A. R. Ammons
useless, probably: the marvelous useless, though, seems
more marvelous than the useful marvelous: but I just
drink the water: soothing occlusion: where can I find
285any junk: every street or alley I look into bedazzles
_________
me with poetry, the call to naming, to saying forth,
to being said forth: when I get the fences, lightpoles,
ladders, plastic tricycles, cracked concrete slabs all
together in a heap the heap will round up and bloom
290into the shapeliest rose: today, I am filled with anger,
the worst-looking thing in the house or on the street:
it’s a fifth: last night they had a fourth, a boom-boom
show, pow, pow, k-choom: everybody that could get
there got there, wheelchairs, forearm walking braces,
295canes, four-footed canes, tricycles, bicycles, motor
bikes and cycles, skating boards, and jams and jams
of cars: one ought to try to define what is so great
about a fireworks (firewords) show and then design a theory
of poetry around the definitions: I guess colorful
300explosions are, by all odds, what we most adore:
and then, even more, colorful explosions that assume
sky-high figure, umbrellas of downspinning, metronomic
regularity of hard staccato with the punctuating white
terminal stab: dit, dit, dit, dit, WHAM: and the
305transitoriness of it all, worse than day lilies, calls
out the hunger of immediate appreciation or loss of
life: everybody wants a community of shared perceptions
and with fireworks you get the community: last year
we had a well-publicized poetry show and attracted
310fifteen people: half of them, approximately, were the
performers, and the other half, scattered and roped
wives, husbands, cousins, intimate friends: it was
_________
not a good show: if you want the community to turn out
don’t build a church, ballet theatre, sound stage,
315art museum or any of those expensive, cultural things:
this is the difference in a democracy: the money is
where the people is: in the old days, the money was
where the people wasn’t: so, I guess we’ll have to
adjust: 199 years independent, we may learn yet that
320a servitude to numbers is still servitude: and worse,
the few are run out of face into comedy at their
gatherings, having no glitter of diamond, even, to sanction
the glitter of mind: our artists to the trash pile!
of course: well, let us make a mess of trash:
325politically equal (in theory), let us begin to form an
aristocracy of life (in fact): (let us make certain
our group does not form out of public, governmental
funds: wherever there are funds, mediocre managers
gather to swivel and sway: they create objectives and
330the objectives are wrong: they create evaluations and
don’t know what they’re talking about: they seize the
power stick and they know they have the right instrument
and they “help” you right out of your mind: ta ta:)
this is Feeding the Fucking Sparrows Day: why not:
335they make a round table out of a slice of bread:
an occasional fluttering, peckery disagreement, but
then right back to it: funny, though, they eat the
table which, nonArthurian, goes from square to round, then
tears away in chunks till it’s flown away as all-day
_________
340providers: over nothing there is no disagreement: but
it’s hard to keep Feeding the Fucking Sparrows Day from
becoming also Feeding the Fucking Starlings Day and
Feeding the Fucking Grackles Day: purity needs a
mixture to know itself by: a lively play of the mind
345over the particulars like wind over the inlet tide:
tomorrow we will have another Day called Listening
for the Sparrows to Cut the Fucking Cheese Day: yesterday
was Independence Day: someday we will have to call a
Day Interdependence Day: neither sincere nor serious,
350I hesitate to engage anything above the level of a
broken bottle for fear of being, in a free state,
misunderstood or investigated: questioned closely, I
would have to admit that the America I love is hardly
in prevalent view so it must be somewhere hiding around
355weeds, fencerows, windowboxes, railsidings, and abandoned
roads: hiding around abandoned roads is a good one:
what would you say differentiates the highminded from
the lowdown good-for-nothings: clearly, it’s a matter
of altitude: but altitude in terms of what:
360perhaps, it is representativeness, including the
principles of synopsis, assimilation, concept: then
there’s high society as over and against the low, common,
and vulgar: then there are high places (where the rich
live): everything high appears to be desirable except
365high meat prices: why is that: I’m just sure that our
fundamental image is hierarchical, disposed like a
_________
mountain with the wide and numerous low shrinking to the
narrow and lofty few: thank goodness, I’m the very
peakstone of something, a mt, though I don’t know how high
370it is: it is not as high as General Motors or even
Anaconda Copper or Kennecott: it’s about as high as
up to here: anyhow, I’m sitting on it: it feels good:
bowling champions make twelve times as much as poetry
champions: pool sharks about ten: tennis, fifty, etc.:
375poetry is a range of ridges which, however, rises:
since (life is a terminal disorder) to choose to gogo
forward into life, or a makeshift thereof, is also
to choose death, it’s hard to get everybody up and out in
the morning bushy with appetite: but nature to
380prevent bitching makes it bindingly easy on us by
providing only one way to go(go), choose it or not, a
half-reassuring nudge or fate-motif that relieves us
of the responsibility for any ultimate disposition
to things: the sparrow lights in the steel fence mesh
385and cheeps: (note the two orders of statement: one
is endlessly expandable and conditional and the other
firm and complete): we had the fifth last night: I
mean that last of the fifth: today is the sixth: last
night was the drum and bugle corps competition: every
390corps should have won, although some should have won
more than others: I liked St. Ignatius from Hicksville
best though, although the leader was great, I liked the
leader of the first corps better—the Black Watch, I
_________
think: she was heartbreakingly beautiful: I loved her
395instantly as I must love her forever: though she was
in perfect command, she was not commanding: that is,
command was not so much in question as to be required:
her high-stepping stills were all the same,
rigorous and to the exact height: when she walked,
400when she walked her right fist came to her chin, her
left hand flicked out behind her, completely feminine
in a total dignity: she never once seemed self-conscious
o
r out of role: even in her salute to the audience
her participation was altogether with the corps: at
405the end, when the corps paraded by the stands, she did
not yield a flicker of acknowledgment but held her part
strict and clear: the other leaders, grand as they
were, introduced some spoiling bit of sentimentality or
grossness: ah, when the thing is flawlessly done! and
410done pleasingly, not to please: it is an unbearably, I say,
noble and generous use of the self, a beauty beyond
every demand or contingency, a beauty in itself: this
is not a matter of content or invention: the creator
of the routine has his own place: this is performance
415when performance itself creates clutches of value: I’ve
heard performers, musicians, dancers knocked because
they were the puppets of original genius but performance
exceeds creativity into its own genius: this is the beauty
of “Do the villanelle and shut up”: here I’m
420working the antipode, the exact opposite: the slouch,
_________
the shambles, the crying out, the sore toe, bum knee
after the show is over: but this is the sixth: it
is Feeding the Fucking Sparrows Again Day: it’s the
same if you look for junky language: in a way one hunk
425of idiom floats swirls of energy as well as another:
get your afflatus flattened, it just takes on prevalence:
masturbation is handy, cheap, and clean: it engorges
itself on phantasy, the line between the imagination
and the seminal vesicle direct: hit the right image
430and you come immediately: the scrotum is the conjurer’s
bag of stones, bones, trinkets that are spilled out
and sorted through till the sought image turns up,
inflaming in its finding, desire seized and placed
in context and given course: these little trinkets
435touch off the deepest reservoirs of the self, unlock
releases, the truest version: deepest are images of
the other, or the same, or some detail or part of the
other or the same, or even an image of the whole
spiritual self of the other, or an image of the other’s
440response, as seen in eyes or felt as through the central
line of the imagination: any way to get there is the
necessary way: any way that leads away ranges farthest
and most accurately when it keeps its holding there:
so we are in ourselves men and women, some of us with
445phantasies that derive from and play into reality, some
of us with phantasies reality cannot support or fulfill:
nevertheless, crippled or distraught, we are members one
_________
of another, truly, and must appeal outwardly to rights
and responsibilities: it is hard to be whole, unless it
450is quite easy: anyway, we know, as when we hug a son,
the spirit flows, it moves from the full self into the
need: the transportation feels actual and
physical: similar transmissions occur when one’s arms
are around the beloved or when one thinks of a friend
455away: these are the knowledges that lie lowest and rise
highest in us: the bailiwick of love that best allows
and describes us: still, it is so hard to write
significantly of insignificant nothingnesses: until
the poet comes, Wilbur or Wakoski, we must wait to see:
460yesterday was 7-5-75: today next year will be 7-6-76:
then there will be the once-in-a-decade 7-7-77, century:
boy, innertube, and creek: get away with this: you can’t
go by me: cutting figures gets a big hohum: why’s a man
like you a man like you: rock has gutlevel appeal,
465simplicity, and story line: plowed fields patched here
and there with brilliant standing water: Yeats would
have been okay if he hadn’t named his wife George:
careful that the truth that sets you free doesn’t kill
somebody else: the poet of nature or of civilization
470reports a human seeing: the longest thing in North
Carolina is Sunday morning: sex is at the bottom of
things: circle around the truth without telling
it and you tell it: clearing, thicket: a poem
is a thicket whose clearing is disposition: you find
_________
475as much interest in the world as you have in it: you’re
practically rotten before you’re ripe: day makes light
of night: (realism, mimetic representation: copying,
in different dimensions and modes the apparently real
world the way it, to all appearances, really is): there
480are two heavens, one is this world’s pleasure: the other
is release from this world’s pain: well, the juice has
expired and the therapy has run out of this: it is the
next day, no apparent improvement over the preceding:
it is Monday, July 7, 1975: the big weekend is over,
485including, I hope, the all-night bouts and brawls in
the house next door where a bunch of young fellows are
doing a little renting: the music loud and bumpy from
midnight on, the girls in gales of hightalk and humor,
the men resorting to blows: the motorcycles at 3 a.m.
490tearing up the backyard and getting stuck in the beach
sand of the tearing: a kind of middle class, vacationing
howl: I should call this Get the Fuck Out Day: but to
where: this is my last resort: the dog across the street
that for two summers hung over the fence yelping to
495whistling hysteria at every passerby till two in the
morning has been stationed back a ways behind the filling
station: he still yaps but not with such proximal
intensity: to make up for it, the lady next door has
acquired a youngling which barks with youthful expectation
500whenever possible: the noise level here is the sound
equivalent of the trash level, including trashtruck noise:
_________
poets have no intention of saying what they mean: so
they say something else that means what they mean:
this reeling looking-around connects disparate areas
505and through gravity compels them to form a globe;
similitude and metaphor having arisen: in swerving
away from the direct telling, the poet incorporates
related areas of the world within his swerves, the
bindings of avoidance: I spend a good deal of the
510day rocking on the front porch girl watching: or
boy watching: what with the long hair and slender
shapely backs you can get pretty far into admiration
before you realize it’s a boy: that’s a puzzling,
stalling, acrid feeling, going in under the concept
515girl and backing out under the concept boy: well,
we’re told to love everybody and such confusion makes
it a lot easier: I wish everybody would go to his
library or neighbor and find out what ragweed is: then
if everybody would just see to his own place, we could,
520I’ll bet, get all or most of the ragweed pulled up today:
it’s not that hard to pull it up, specially the month
before it blooms when it stands about a foot or less:
I just pulled up two plants growing at the foot of the
&nb
sp; telephone pole next to the gas station: then I pulled
525up in five minutes a sight of small plants behind
the gas station where there’s a discontinuity of soil between
the street and the elevated pouring for the station:
if everybody on his lot would get together and pull
_________
together, we could plink every plant out in an hour:
530of course, ragweed pollen is so fine it will float in
from anywhere: but local effects can have some effect:
let’s try it, everybody: pitch in and pull up: some
kid or assless old man or watery-thighed old woman might
get a little relief: relief is what we’re after: I’ve
535been so overstimulated lately it’s been frantic: I’ve
screwed and otherwise engineered myself down to blanks
but the continual flow of barefooted, half-naked nymphs
by the door, and firm, phallic-bodied youths, has
kept me in a constant, surprised knowledge of the reality:
540I really don’t know what else to try, to get relief from
relief: I’m afraid I’m going to wear myself out: back,
as far as I’m concerned, to Feeding the Fucking Superego:
or Counting the Cottonpicking Cracks in the Sidewalk:
this one gal last night at the gala said, “That’s not what
