by A. R. Ammons
_________
it’s about not knowing what it’s about: a
better beginning, however, might have been to
begin before the beginning with a great idea
4090full of precious content: content may, though,
sometimes interfere with the essential motions
that spell out stuff better than sense does:
essential motion for the most part implies
form, for essentiality is curiously both
4095highly defined and indefinable: what an
interesting combination: and what kind of
world are you in that you’re ending up in: I’d
say, whatever there is an inside to, I’m
outside: up to here I wrote the other day when
4100a videotaper aimed at me and my old typewriter
and said, write: what was I to write, the
imperative without warm-up or compass: you
have to look out when you let a photographer
into your place: they see quick possibilities
4105that rearrange your furniture, pull your
window plant out of its disposition to the
light, and work in angles not suggested by the
flat floor and straight wall: my philodendron
has lost half a lobe on a leaf and, for some
4110reason, the standing lamp won’t turn on: I
think poets should keep the doors to their
little work studies closed and seek publicity
_________
in bars and at charity balls, auctions, and
street fights: outdoorspersons: it is not
4115worth 43¢ to be known as a poet: gangsters
have more fun, partly as a consequence of being
in a low tax bracket: poets would consider it
an honor to get within the range of paying
taxes, whereas gangsters fire back: but honor
4120is a stale thing that makes you feel stuffy:
imagine getting honor and stiff taxes
88
my father-in-heaven is my father: my father is
in heaven: that is where nothing, not even my
father, is: there, there is no pain, no strain,
4125no gain, no train, no rain: so little is there
not even any knowledge of the little is: but,
beautifully, it lasts forever: wherever
anything is it can’t stay: but nothing, which
is like the spirit with no body, endureth
4130forever: this is a hard thought: if this
universe closes down, will anything be missing:
the childlike question, what was here before
the universe was, becomes in time sensibly,
where do I get the forms to fill out to apply
4135for this job: is it true that if I had never
existed, been born, my existence would never
have existed in the universe: you mean, there
_________
are all these millions of beings that have
never come into the universe and, now, never
4140will: well, then, is the universe only that
which has come into existence: and would the
universe be different if it had happened
differently: my sisters and I were in the
kitchen one day—the old kitchen, before the
4145new one was built (on the other end of the house)—
and we were dancing and singing and speaking
in tongues like the big old women at Sunday
meeting, when my mother came in and told us
that mocking the Holy Ghost was an unpardonable
4150sin: well, but what a bad thing to know, then
I mean: and if you’ve already done one it
apparently doesn’t matter if you don’t stop:
we might as well have been let go, never to
know we’d sinned: I was a little boy: I
4155couldn’t lift heavy weights: I wanted some
more unpardonable sins: it seemed like you
could move around in a bunch of them, but what
if there was only one, and it was changeless:
long-lasting intensifications can breed from
4160some things: my father, too, he squelched
my sass, flailed my anger (whipped my ass):
he dis-tamed me: oh, I been wild a lot: the
title of my autobiography is Me All Over:
_________
this isn’t it: I have miles to sleep before
4165I go
YOU BET YOU BIT
89
whatever happens now (let’s pray that it will
all be, though it is not likely to be, good)
I guess in my 71st year I’ve had my turn: turn
4170as in going from something fresh and new to
something old and fresh, no, I mean, old and
stale: or it could be called a turn through
time, a hand sweeping the arc from dawn to
noon to dusk: this familiar poeticism sounds
4175okay, but wouldn’t it be funny if you could
glance up at the sky and see where the hand of
your time was: the sweep for some would be on
a grander scale than for others, which implies
that each of us has his own sky really, some
4180little bubbles, some crashed hands hanging there
stupidly in the dome, the arc, hardly begun,
incomplete: whereas, some old fogies
dwell with the setting sun and dance in the
dusk like bouncing bubbles, not staying down
4185and not popping, either: this thing could be
a trope, too, this turn, a spiritual thing,
_________
a thingless thing, a giddy or terrified rise,
even in some cases a comfortable and longed-for
coming down: the young look up and see so much
4190time they forget the moving hand and only much
(two much’s) later are shocked to see the hand
leaning weightily west: alas, was that
lost time, then: what time is unnoted time:
well, so, like, we found these nestled nuts
4195in a closet corner, and, like, well, Phyllis
said, we have a mouse: so we did because
there he was the next morning in the trap I set
but so then we were watching Seinfeld when
abruptly another mouse, like, darted across
4200the floor, out upon the floor actually and
back, so, well, like, I set the trap again,
but can you believe after two nights it
remains unsprung: I suppose the mouse smelled
death and ran out the way he came, like, gee,
4205well, it is dangerous; like, he smelled death
and departed: I want to bubble on the brink
provided the spritz isn’t pain:
O HANDS OF TIME
BACK UP
90
4210if the world were not commonly perceived to be
ordinary, the marvelous would not be valuably
rare: whereas, if it were perceived to be
marvelous, we’d sit about in trial podsnapperies
waiting for the ordinary to come true: so the
4215world tilts on many a teeter-totter, for
where’s the fun (or scare) of anything level,
still, or equal: I no longer (did I
ever) care what you think: I am so much alone,
you are not here: I am here with the words
4220that like thistle fuzz float away: only when
the fuzz gets away will the world’s weight be
dealt with: you, if you were here, would make
the world heavy, wanting to know how it is it
can go away: when we are gone we will not
; 4225want to know anything, yet all will be the
same: an answer is not the same thing as a
mountain falls or rose, but, who knows, maybe
it can be the pathway to the cistern of a
spring or a black-diamond millpond cold in
4230summer: maybe queries and responses give
circulation to the things that sit still and
be: if the circulations sometimes fail, so do
the boulders—a tilting wind, say, a hill
_________
undermined by a floodwash: I don’t like too
4235much grain in my poetry: airiness and light,
the sweet emptiness of thought, transport me:
concretion staggers the burro, especially on
rocky paths through the mountains, where,
sometimes dusty and sore-footed I climb up on
4240top of everything and nearly break the poor
thing’s back:
GET HELP
91
the news of the week is not much better than
last week’s: as improvisational melodies
4245come and go at the piano, so the mind breaks
against some configuration and makes off into
netlike effusions, or so brooks register at the
surface a crack in the slate and flow on, the
registration dissolving in the mixed motions:
4250so much goes away that saved would fill the
world up with fluff: in fact, so much goes
away it’s a scientific wonder how anything is
still here: I mean, how does so much of it
find a route back and in what condition does
4255it arrive and by what appearances and means
did it effect the transition: I, myself, am
_________
not a scientist: I do not even spend much time
gathering evidence, so it’s unlikely any likely
hypotheses could jump up out of my mounds: the
4260fact is that so much goes away but hardly
anything really does: that is what gets me:
how does so much stuff slither in and out or
go round and round, shaping up and shipping
out: well, it gives me the heebie-jeebies but
4265doesn’t really make any difference to me: if
things can phony the golden years up out of
rust, why. . . .
PLAYPRETTY
92
you could wish you were dead before it’s too
4270late; that is, before the devices arrive with
their doctors or before the complications knot
up into stall: you could wish to slip away in
the cool of a late evening, a daiquiri in one
hand, the other up somebody’s thigh—all your
4275money in CDs, not with the MDs: if you
slip away you are merely gone from our time,
dear, dear, hour time, for there is no
time frame out there in eternity you should
_________
swerve away from, too awesome to deal with from
4280our pitiably short perspectives: oh, no: all
you would be missing out on is a little more
business as usual, not, as you have probably
already noted a widely critical matter: still
a worm can be so tender on a new leaf that
4285just flicking it away ruins it, and you wouldn’t
want to risk anything too early: so, now mind
you, mind me and be still—or very certain:
93
in time all the stories become the same story:
the energies play out and the hole at the end
4290contains everything: pour in the guilt, the
hope, the sour mischance, the dream, the adroit
turn: there is room enough: after corruption’s
overfilling swells pass through, the everything
of everything distills and the grave mound
4295gives itself back to the level and all of the
everything escapes like a breath from the
scene unseen: meanwhile, though, joy can
break out anywhere: eyes can fall in the
giving up of giving oneself away or the heart
4300can throb at the simplicity of taking what is
given, the simplicity and the breaking surf:
_________
oft when the question of saving arises there’s
not much left to save: or capacity to save:
might as well let it go, they say: it’s for
4305the best: death when death is not the worst
shows up and hangs its shingle out: deliverance
is exactly not what deliverance is: pound to
pound, quid to quo—evenness, evenness, oh,
it’s all even: it comes out as much of this
4310as that, life having been some sort of
imbalance in our favor: how is it it all goes
away yet it’s all here: it must go through an
invisible phase somewhere: it’s as if there’s
nothing to see in there between the going away
4315and coming round again, a little slice of
invisibility—or else an opacity, the sum of
too many things to think about
94
live unknown and when you go little knowledge
goes away: live unknown and little knowledge
4320dies with you: a little thing closes up like,
say, a rose: a bit of dust floats off a
canyon wall: a glimmer of air changes direction:
a barnacle takes its feathers in: a little
feathery loss, like the whisper of a single
4325sea oat crushed underfoot: so little to forget
_________
what nearly never was, what came and went
unnoted, the glimmer of a sunny brook on a
rock wall in the wild wood: so little grief,
a kind of nonevent, an absence occupying an
4330absence, an absence moved out of an absence:
but, in a way, lots of knowledge dies with you:
your knowledge: all that, of course, is
expected to disappear and that loss is hardly
remembered in our memories: a whole world,
4335which was yours, went, though no one else knew
about it: wonder where it went: well, there
are flighty manifestations—things that might
have happened but didn’t and things, such as
your world, that sharing never brought into
4340existence—that is, into an existence that
could be missed and mourned: but in another
way that existence is no more or less than any
existence, since it all ceases, including the
rememberers: well, well, so, so: in one
4345time frame different things are in another time
frame the same: an odd uprising: if they had
not melted the earth would be caked with
dinosaur bones, so many bones dropped over so
many millions of years: the relatively few
4350petrifications pour knowledge into us very
similar to memories: just think: the saurs
_________
lived unknown (to us) but now are known, are
becoming known: they are coming into a new
genesis and evolution similar to a genesis and
4355evolution: perhaps discoveries will unwind a
