by A. R. Ammons
do you suppose there is Noone in the
sky: has Hubble spotted nothing:
is it really true that a dust cloud
is collapsing somewhere (so slowly)
2935that will center out a sun, perhaps
with remnant planets, and everything
will start out all over again
somewhere else: and is there nothing
left in the whirling dark star but
2940whirling, that hard dark body whirling:
my goodness: are we merely here:
are we only a mockery the light will
never miss: I saw dogs catch a
squirrel on campus today: well fed
2945they just mauled it and didn’t eat
it: later, I passed close to look
upon it and a blowfly, bright metallic,
was pitching about on it: I think
that whatever cares for the squirrel
2950was in the squirrel and somehow
failed: the fly “cares” but the
dogs are gone, doggone dogs: other
squirrels were not in attendance:
when something dies you might as well
_________
2955forget about it
61
see a penny, pick it up, it’s 2¢ (and
the IRS spurned), considering taxes,
village, city, county, state, federal,
school, and sales: I cried out to
2960the heights in my misery, and the
heights said, cool it, and said,
can’t you see I’m making and colliding
galaxies and stuff and watching the
watches (I mean, clocks) and over
2965there a 150,000,000-stretch of
light years is turning to plasma and
something is always going off like
popcorn, a peppery popping of suns,
or a smacking of wobbly stones
2970long-dwelt in speed: so I said,
listen, okay, I get it, cool it: &
just there in that wrung moment I
understood the guiding principle and
started scaring up a little supper:
2975hey, you never know: you could win
the lottery or your poems could come
in for something, your bone could
_________
_________
harden, or the sun could do itself
in, a quick quieting: I would say,
2980go ahead, call out to the heights:
it couldn’t hurt: the heights,
unmollifiable, continued, listen,
this cut-up method will not work,
I can’t be spoken to this way and
2985what was it you said anyway: one
could go on with this: in the
beginning, it was easier, I think,
to begin than it is now: there was
some say one big pop, after which
2990complexity quickly ensued: whereas
if you began today, you would be
faced (figuratively) with an estimated
unenumerated 100 million species:
whereas there were no species at all
2995at first: when mud separated into
water and rock, then there were three
things: and light: I just feel so
broken down: there isn’t a bit of
room on this tape for a little
3000expansion or elaboration: sculpture
becomes grit: kidneys, tubules: a
blinding lack of scope and sense’s
fracturing frit: but, of course,
_________
when everything runs, nothing runs
3005through your mind: the total
answering makes no world where you
can see the carriage rounding the
bend: streams need to break in on
themselves into banks and tend, this
3010way or that, noticeably apart:
everybody knows that’s what holds us
here forever limited, forever fragile
and not forever: there’s a bump on
my rump, right in the abyss of my
3015yss
62
have I put my input in: if not, where
have I put it: I’ve written so much
I think I must have put in my input:
but every morning afresh, I feel
3020unexpressed: rain in the luminous
woods, yellow with unfallen fall,
feels like creation beginning: and
gulls foraging on the lawn by the waste
treatment plant blur in and out of
3025form through windshield
rain: I always supposed the better
place we go to was better because it
_________
was better: but, of course, it’s
better because it’s no place, nothing
3030at all, an end to this place:
that’s better: now, the furniture
of forever, the terra celestial, the
gold streets lining puffy clouds,
the throne, the streams that flow by
3035(benches, hammocks, somewhere to lie
or sit down)—oh, well, I don’t have
to do away with kitchen materials
because I never think, and never
thought, of kitchens: a clear
3040place—O Blivion: I still like it
here: learn to love misery, confusion
and you better here considerably
63
sixty years ago, I used to hear every
Sunday that Jesus was coming: the
3045preacher wasn’t specific but said it
could be any hour or minute but
certainly before next Sunday: next
Sunday would come but no Jesus, and
the preacher never seemed embarrassed
3050for his disaster quotient was as high
as ever, and certainly something had
to happen before next Sunday: Jesus
_________
was coming, the good people would be
caught right up where they were,
3055fishing or frigging, and the graves
were to fly open, the nice people
winging away, and the bad folks about
to get it: well, all this will do
well as a statement of the provisionality
3060of things, a warning not to rely on
any morrow but to check out today:
I guess that’s why the congregation
never seemed alarmed to be there but
skittish about ever being there
3065again: after all, it’s what the Bible
said: and most of all it sounded
right: a sky rock the size of Rhode
Island, already on course if a million
years off, is probably what they,
3070I mean the preacher, was/were really
worried about because it might hit
any minute: but the boats this morning
down by the steamboat landing, now
the Farmers’ Market, bobbed barely
3075in the boat shed, each boat in its
stall standing in water quiescent as
the giant bulls in the bull barn after
a draining emotional experience: (you
_________
know how they run out the artificial
3080cow, mounted on something like a
slender wheelbarrow, all of which the
bull mounts, willing, no doubt, to
be fooled but worried something’s not
completely right: what, tho, won’t
3085a creature do for a little relief:
no telling how many times the bull
has to come every year: but that is
an unworthy verbal effect: the bulls
are royalty, prizewinning ribb
ons
3090cascading down their stall doors:)
but it was pouring rain this morning
after months of dry weather, and the
boats appeared sulled in their booths,
adoze like the nearly satisfied
3095bulls, but the people at the market
were mostly missing, a cold rain,
an anxious rattle of rain on the tin
roof, the greens still not hit by
frost: a sense of an imminence, a
3100change, snow pellets in the higher
elevations: we need to think of the
power of prevention and the prevention
of power
64
well, it’s true, I’m from North
3105Carolina where there’s precious little
ice skating, but we do get brittle
little crusts of ice on puddles and
stuff, you can crack it, pane thin,
and eat it like a wafer: slips in
3110your hands and freezes your fingertips
but so cold and good to your teeth:
I know why I write in this method:
if I don’t write what I’m thinking
right then, it slips my mind: yep:
3115gone for good: sometimes, the next
day, or several weeks later, I have
a thought that has an air of
remembrance about it, and I think,
gee, this may not be déjà vu exactly
3120but I think I’ve been down this
street before: I remember now that
yesterday morning or this morning
when I was coming back from the
campus store with a mocha chip muffin
3125I was thinking of the word cramp and
I was thinking how this tape cramps
my style: it breaks down my extended
_________
gestures: it doesn’t give your
asshole time to reconfigure after a
3130dump: everything happens before its
time, interrupted, turned back, cracked
up: but yesterday or today when I
thought of cramp, I thought of so
many mots justes to go with it, but
3135now I’m trying to remember a memory,
the words juste neither to this morning
nor to now: anyhow, I am brittlized,
run like a cow through a cow dip, my
flourishes stripped down, my feathers
3140deflowered: so cramped, my words
lose letters on the right-hand edge or
I start typing too early on the left-hand
side and slice words up: I
keep thinking, oh, I’ll remember what
3145that word was supposed to be, but
I’ve already told you about my memory
but I figure when I xerox the strip
onto regular paper, I’ll fill out the
words in pencil, so a typist can get
3150it right: what, though, is right:
wouldn’t it be better to let the words
come out of and go into breakage in
the usual way we, too, come and go:
_________
wouldn’t it be truer: wouldn’t
3155accidence be bodied forth into
revelation: have you ever heard a
whore moan (hormone?). . . .
65
when the trees tug trying to hold
the wind back (or, more accurately,
3160when the wind nearly sweeps the
trees away) do you suppose the
resistance each leaf, twig, branch,
trunk puts up and communicates to the
roots thrusts the earth forward into
3165faster rotation: or, if not, and
there are just the right number of
winds in the right places, does
contrariety resolve into no effect:
or take for example, since the earth
3170takes hold of nothingness in the
highest atmospheres, is there no pry
pole (I mean, no station) the pry
pole can get leverage on: even if
not, cdn’t it be true that since all
3175the energy derives from outside the
system (the sun, for the most part)
why couldn’t winds persist in certain
_________
areas and directions to make the
earth sail the way ships do, the old
3180kind of ships or recent racers: just
so, though the scope collapses, my
contradictions blow me about but
perhaps no more than turn me around
spinning me nowhere, no tours, no
3185plane or Amtrak trips, just a sort
of top digging down, screwing in:
screwed in far enough, I might (wd)
find turning trying and then the winds
of my sentiments would just wear
3190themselves out and me as if I were a
stob: do I contradict myself, you
say: well, I get interested in both
sides of the argument: I am unhappily
not an either/or person but a
3195both/and: I have more sides than
two: I have so many they round off
like a glazed stob or bead of water:
enough about me: I sure wish I could
think about something else
Part Two: Scat Scan
66
3200well, it’s true, clarity is in the extremes,
whereas truth muddles in the middle: of
course, nigh onto everyone wants truth to sidle
over to where clarity is, but on the trip
qualification trips it and exception douses it
3205and contradiction split-chunks it and clearly
what arrives at clarity as truth is so
yellowed-weak with travail that it is just often
sent back in disgust on a return trip likely to
wear it down to nothing: what are we to do:
3210whew: desperate to make a dollar, some guys
on the outskirts between farming and
handymanning will borrow into front-end
gear for snowplowing and then one or two snows
fit to plow will hit the whole winter, and the
3215guys go under: nature is subtler than a pound
of spiders: and the next winter, likely,
bankrupt, they sit buried behind their long
roads, while we, unused, break our backs and
hearts on shovels: our destructive rage
3220against the unmercifulness of nature has
put us in need of saving environmentalists, who
_________
have perhaps never happened
upon a nest of rattlers: we had to
tear down half the woods to have a door to keep
3225the wolves away from: don’t tell me that
fetches of wind and slugs of rain erode the
fields; where is the cabbage to come from: and
are we or are we not to give a summit or two
to the iron ore of skillets: language plays
3230upon what-is the way light plays on water: it
is without substance (as light nearly is):
moving, glancing, dipping, cresting is its
veracity: the ghoulish light on the water of
cisterns, tomb-stale: the flitting flickers
3235of flinty ice crystals nearly too light to
land: the honey weight of heat waves: evil
shakes in the shadows it shuns the light to
find: light apparently travels in the dark
becoming visible as the object it strikes, even
3240the deep blue heaven on those sucked-dry
skinny-bright days the commingling of light
with atmosphere: (alas,
the once great Mozart
is now Muzak): my science may be right or
wrong but telling you about it is the truth:
3245all this dithery dawdling, I can’t get going
67
you scan the surface and not a crevice
