The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2

by A. R. Ammons

  Man, say Hiawathum’s Dad, forget

  15about that nature poetry:

  this here’s the urban age

  (1965)

  All Set

  I’m so bottled

  up,

  wind is wine, water

  lethal alcohol:

  5blood’s dustblack

  powder: light

  any nerve-end

  (1968)

  Confessional Poem

  Let me be honest with you:

  in spite of everything I have

  a (oh my) penis: and

  you know what: girls don’t:

  5girls don’t have one:

  and (horrors) boys put theirs

  in girls and girls

  like to have them: (also,

  boys, boys—and, somehow, girls,

  10girls)

  if I can’t get a girl—I

  hardly ever can—I

  sometimes think hard &

  squiggle my own: girls (hee hee)

  15even squiggle theirs

  and (shudder) I also crap &

  leak: you know: how awful:

  oh love my admissions & I’ll

  honestly try to substitute loving

  20my honesty for loathing myself.

  1968 (1968)

  For Andrew Wyeth

  Outside the window the leaf in a hedge breeze

  spins at the end of an invisible web, a lure

  to the present from the nothingness it came from

  and goes to: separated, its brilliant ruin

  5come to life, it spins in a motion separation

  in the long under-turns of wind allows to things

  the wind has taken to show its presence by:

  in the knowledge of our death already

  in some way dead, we know, as leaves do not,

  10though to spin in an indifference common to ours,

  the contemplation of our spinning keeps us, though

  separated, here, shocked awake, sharp with ruin:

  but obliterations sustain: we exact from winter light

  endless differentiations in a foot of wood’s floor

  15but can’t approach the light’s source: time from

  deeps that may be whole (and still) swirls out,

  emerges into hill or house, thrusts upward the held

  cool definition of a face, time that makes and

  changes: the void at the heart and at the heart

  20of all gives perfect way to our tightest dance but

  has no space to afford the vanished dance: time,

  light, space—fathers and tenders of mushrooms,

  rootbark, fabulously-couched windseed—suffer, or

  suffer not at all, the obliteration of their infinite

  25care: the terror time gives us beginnings: the

  void lets us move: blinding light gives us sight:

  separated into the knowledge of our death we make

  a life that keeps, a time that going holds, a motion

  that moving stays: emerging onto the long doomed slope

  30of the hill, we force our sight to deny the broad

  motions of nothingness into grass, the vacant wall

  into scratch and grain: but giving way neither

  to easy dream nor helpless ruin we make versions of

  the real, so that if separate in our knowledge we may know.

  1968 (1968)

  Dinah

  Some are too difficult to win.

  I work to remove her doubt.

  By the time I’ve figured me in,

  She’s already figured me out.

  1968 (1969)

  Chinaberry

  Out in the edge of the yard at evening

  under the reaching chinaberry tree

  in the belled, gray country silence

  mother and father

  5sitting in the cool on the washbench,

  the black iron washpot

  three-legged and belly burnt

  the other side of the path circling the yard,

  under the outer arms of the chinaberry umbrella,

  10the wooden wide bench, soapslick dry,

  galvanized tubs upside down,

  cold to touch in the summer dusk,

  contained, exact in inner dreams—

  we stand in our diagonal of height,

  15Mona singing her clear, gospel-singing, happy soprano,

  devotional gems, songs of deliverance, glory

  trains and royal telephones,

  Vida, her thin-faced pale alto self-taught

  coming like whippoorwills weary with sleep, next

  20in height, and I, shortest,

  too young to more than keep the tune,

  singing together, together to the sandhill fields,

  to whatever moves in with night over the pines,

  coming from where in the west the far great

  25cherry on the ditchbank stands, standing out black

  against the farther, lower pines,

  together to the tired, song-starved mother,

  My Friend is the King,

  to the father of three, three gray faces under

  30the darkening tree, three here, three in graves,

  together to the sleeping coops and quiet barns

  Oh where is my wandering boy tonight?

  On the top of Mt. Zion is a City

  three singing in the deep-lying Carolina country

  35far from town

  “prettiest thing I ever heard”

  eyes lost in the green blood of night’s tears

  of old inherited sorrows, grainy & wasted as the land,

  beautiful, wasted as the years in

  40the mother’s face, in the father’s hands.

  (1969)

  Diner

  The baked potato’s

  hot slit’s

  a forward nookie:

  I put butter in:

  5it flelts and mows:

  I stick my fork in:

  the white meat quivers some:

  I soak my tongue in there,

  eat the

  10quarterpound reality.

  1968 (1970)

  Address

  Saying blanket obligations

  on the

  flowery periphery of the coronal

  roar

  5(and intimately touched by,

  bound in

  to the black-eyeing blind

  radiance)

  I have trouble

  10forming the figure of my

  address—man to man, man to it,

  for man through it—

  I would speak to the

  highest figure in order to speak

  15for and to man and

  to it

  and so exclude not a

  dimension from the adequate saying:

  what I speak to has not been born

  20or has not died,

  is deaf and wholly hearing,

  keeps me not at all, as

  water keeps the buoy:

  keeps me

  25still

  by the spangling linearity

  of its motions:

  to complete me, lets me fail:

  here is the sun:

  30here the tall redemption:

  here is the flower:

  here is the blue spruce.

  1970 (1973)

  Untelling

  Poetry is the word that has no other words,

  the telling indistinguishable from the told:

  it is all body (spirit) until it moves

  and moving only is its declaring, divisible

  _________

  5neither into mind nor feeling, mind-felt,

  form only if motion stays an instant into form,

  otherwise, form-motion, the body and the void

  interpenetrating, an assuming, a perfect allowance:

  how it moves away, returns, settles or

  10flashes by, how it works its worked space

/>   into memory’s body may tell tellings,

  narratives, progressions beyond,

  surrounding an instant’s telling, though

  only body-in-motion places them there:

  15being is its afterlife whose life was becoming:

  mind and other words confront, untell its dream.

  1970 (1973)

  Between

  Bubblers and peepers in the frail green woods!

  goldfinches from a dozen sources in the thickening

  trunk-lifted heights: the day-early version of the night

  peepers, not yet come: it’s spring: hot by the

  5fence where the thousand-legger dug up from dandelion

  roots panics in the sun: but cool, nearly too cool

  in the open if lakewind sheets up over the lawn’s

  swell: it is nearly impossible to imagine horror,

  prostate cancer wards, the grim senseless bleeding,

  10the girl caught pale by fruition lust put out of mind:

  much that brings tears is needful: splendor has that

  shade: from hell the word man spits a heavenly word.

  1969 (1973)

  Mid-Morning

  Square notch like

  a booth or

  berth

  where the dove

  5sat on the limb through

  last night’s

  heaping snow:

  I can look around

  the grove

  10and

  count the doves,

  gone now.

  1973 (1973)

  Necessity

  Brought in before the stone,

  put to my knees,

  made to contemplate the grain,

  I cried, no,

  5let my mind go with roses,

  let it trellis the high unreal arcs:

  leave my blood to

  wells and stars:

  do not, I said, take away the world

  10or separate my time from time:

  the rock drew me in:

  I yielded my illusions up

  and from the hallowed stone pit

  took ash

  15and smeared myself away.

  (1974)

  Scientific Breakdown

  But for an observed phenomenon,

  a stellar irregularity,

  Aristotle might still have

  celestial reality

  5in tow: (the great principle is

  sometimes thrown

  by a negligible fact, and grand

  thoughts have been found

  in humble places):

  10earth, water, air, fire

  concentrically arranged

  vertically toward

  the pure and rarified—the base

  rationally low, the

  15rare high:

  outside and surrounding, the Prime

  Mover: the universe focused

  on man, man’s spectacle,

  where he could read harmony

  20and self-esteem: had

  it not been

  for an irregularity (imperfect deity?)

  (irregularity allows possibility)

  some non-conforming clod

  25could not blind himself to, we might

  not have to face today

  those fuzzy dots

  _________

  on photographic plates—galaxies,

  of which any inch of sky

  30yields blinking billions:

  harmony, you are too

  oversimplified: things

  have to get too big

  before you show: let’s have Old Scratch

  35wriggling into the Garden

  to an irregular Tree:

  perfect knowledge is beyond reach

  and our houses of harmony

  tumble into jumbles,

  40dissonant as a music school: but even

  irregularity has its harmony:

  take the Sacred Three

  Ways to Handle Irregularity: the bowels

  yield to (1) irritation

  45(2) lubrication and (3)

  flushing: so there are Three

  Kinds of Laxative: (1) chemically

  irritates the bowels

  so that to remove the irritant

  50the bowels push all out, a purely

  physical transportation

  (2) mineral oil, prune juice, bananas

  and similar agents

  make lodged crusty billets

  55hard to keep (3) citrates, being saline,

  take water (osmosis) into

  the bowels, thus dehydrating

  _________

  the body, so that irregularity is put

  in soak and finally

  60flushed out, it’s simple:

  this harmony of irregularity, though,

  is schematic: cannot universally apply:

  (too much irregularity

  becomes regular irregularity which is

  65defeating): but harmony

  I’m glad we have you,

  giving us coverage of most probable events:

  how nice it would be,

  in a way, to yield to you fully

  70and have Aristotle and his Prime Mover

  back: (a word of caution: if

  your irregularity is diarrhea,

  choose a demulcifent: literally, dry the

  situation up: but not too dry

  75(wisdom wisdom): you might have

  to switch to oil): knowledge makes pretty

  pictures: thanks, Aristotle, for harmony:

  you, God, for chinks and irregularities.

  (1974)

  Convergences Downward

  Sometimes the bleakness nears

  near-perfect: snow

  swarming down the sky, winds

  rocking high, roaring and chilling,

  5the car an island marooned in the driveway,

  tooth aching, cheek swelling,

  the forecast

  more hard cold:

  every handle to or

  10on the world seems loose

  or broken and then evening

  falls with nothing but night.

  (1974)

  Self

  Will you, considering the life I have borne,

  the nights twisting cold strings of panic,

  other nights (and whole days) the heart racing

  and stalling with terror, fury, and desire,

  5will you, I said, at this point in a life I’ve

  cursed and thought to throw away, a life

  I have hushed in darkness as my own error

  and devising, will you now in a last chastening,

  a humbling like humiliation, require me to come

  10up to the hills of openness and announce my

  life yours, as given by you and to be given back

  to you by me, my gratitude at last for what is

  not my own spoken forth, said into the place that

  hears and cares to hear nothing because it is

  15sound’s own source: my god, my redemption: here

  is the dark breakage I have held, not knowing you

  made it dumb for speech, not knowing its mix and

  constitution just: take this final pride away.

  (1974)

  Attending

  Powwows huddles

  a surrounding emptiness

  a circling into

  common center

  5no circumferential gap

  for the

  running out of

  contemplation,

  for interruptions

  10coming in

  the vacant center like

  the finest slickest slip

  where the imagined

  shareable content can shapen

  15where differences

  without let can unwind

  become

  if they catch onto

  similar differences

  20the new ideal

  informed terrain<
br />
  aggregates clusters clumps

  copses thickets

  brambles

  25powwow in teepee

  muddle in huddle

  (mandala little tricky

  okay if hollow

  in center)

  30create spell there

  grab victory out of there

  dream dreams there

  peace risen

  like teepee center

  35go in

  have dinner

  smoke pipe

  stretch out

  yell at papooses

  40get along fine

  1973 (1975)

  Interim

  We have these

  plastic garbage

  cans the dome

  lids underlatch

  5but won’t stay

  on so a week’s

  rain will come

  to two or three

  inches sometimes

  10rounding out

  the bottom wobbles

  some and a night’s

  freeze will

  put a hard

  15wheel, a round

  pane on the water

  you can wiggle

  out whole and look

  through or roll

  20down the bank

  all the way to

  the creek before

  it cracks

  1975 (1975)

  David

  The verbal