by A. R. Ammons
at a bend in the road where a bridge crosses
a stream: a gaggle swishing leisurely off
hissing and shrieking in mock protest at the boy
10driving the weed pickers to the fields:
animals were television then, so much time to
learn the ways of geese and time to dream
a gooseless world in no need of tending: and
think of the dark lively trees the brookbanks had
15spared and the shattering among waterstones where
the brookfall fell: now, it’s video and digital
and Internet and VCR, usage doing away with
geese, specially ganders, high-billed meanies.
(1997)
Birthday Poem to My Wife
Have you considered how inconsequential we all
are: I mean, in the long term: but
anything getting closer to now—deaths, births,
marriages, murders—grows the consequence
5till if you kissed me that would be a matter
of great consequence: large spaces also include
_________
us into anonymity, but you beside me, as the
proximity heightens, declares myself, and you, to
the stars: not a galaxy refuses its part in
10spelling our names: thus you understand if you
go out in the backyard or downtown to the
grocery store—or take a plane to Paris—
time pours in around me and space
devours me and like inconsequence I’m little and lost.
1997 (1997)
Shot Glass
I’ll never forget the day this beautiful woman
right out in the office said I was “sneaky”:
I didn’t know I was sneaky: I didn’t feel
sneaky: but there are mechanisms below our
5mechanisms, so I assume the lady was right:
living with that has not helped my progress
in the world, if there is any such thing,
progress, I mean: also it has hurt my image
of myself: I have used up so much fellow-
10feeling on the general—all of which I have
forgotten specifically about, as have the
fellows—no offices, no clear images or
demonstrations—I don’t understand why that
one remark holds its place ungivingly in me:
_________
15and now to talk about it, admit to the world
(my reading public, as it happens) that I am
scarred by an old, old wound about to heal and
about to bleed: this may do confessional good
but I will no longer appear perfect to others:
20conceivably, that could be a good thing:
others may be scarred, too, but who wants to
be like them: one should: perhaps I really
do, because lonely splendor is devastatingly
shiny but basically hard and cold, marble
25walls and glistening floors: one comfort,
which I am reluctant to relish, is that the
lady is now dead—surely, I am sorry about that,
she was a person of intelligence and
discernment, which is one reason she hurt me
30so bad—well, but I mean, she won’t hurt
anybody else: she probably did enough good
in her life that the Lord will forgive her:
I am trying to forgive her myself: after all
she left me some room for improvement and
35a sense of what to work on. . . .
1997 (1999)
Embedded Storms
The earth makes ocean bottoms mountain tops:
so it’s not that big a deal to shear a slope
_________
of boughs: so what if rain washes the soil
downstream and builds a marsh somewhere: or
5if the unweathered rock shines in the face of
a new day: or, a slightly more drastic case,
if oxygen disappears, and the anaerobes come
back out to play: it isn’t as if possibility
falls along the line of human wish, if and
10when the big wish is discernible: actually,
human wishes build out into filigrees of
branching, resembling, in fact, the realms of
possibility: I forgot for a moment that nature
freely makes small things of big things: take
15for example the microbial soil previously
mentioned: how fine the little fellows work
the world, the microbes: you would be surprised:
what we have most to fear perhaps is when we
make a big human wish run over a host of little
20possibilities, so that we lack the sight to
see or know what we’re doing: when a
sand scooter runs over the desert, the tracks
disturb ten thousand years of adjustment in the soil:
is anybody going to wait around while the
25adjustment gets back in shape: well, no, but
the earth doesn’t care: it would just as soon
take the sand somewhere else and start over a
new program: the earth like anything was
_________
never intended to be permanent anyhow so don’t
30get your hackles up if a company distributes
the top of a mountain to the grates of some
poor cold people caught up in the crotches of
sharp hills: one wall people keep flinging
themselves against is the one on which something
35permanent could be written or attached: such
foolish hanging on to foolishness: earth will
heave up a sea bottom, as stated, and make a
beautiful island of the cone: and with the
tsunami byproduct it will overwash a nest of
40island-reefs already established green: so
what am I saying here: the dynamic recovers
all its forms and we, too, are wonderfully
made and wonderfully undone: but we really
would like wonders to remain as is, and we wd
45like not to notice the moves that made them
so. . . . (a moral a day keeps the preacher away):
1998 (1999)
Periodontal Abscess
When “hyperemia and infiltration of leukocytes
is marked”
and the submaxillary gland (the one along
the jawbone) swells hard
5and the pain fills tight,
it’s off to the dentist (your own out of town)
_________
if one can be found
not off on Friday or not away on a beep signal
or “not seeing patients this afternoon
10because of all the paperwork to catch up on”
for a little curettage, the bright, shiny
instruments blundering in down
along the roots to
“stir things up”
15so the pus can drain
(a slow transport by blood ooze)
this followed by a two-minute
merthiolate soak-pack of cotton pellets:
feels better already:
20go home and every four or five hours
rinse, holding the water over the tooth,
with saline
solution (1 tablespoon of salt to
8 oz of water) as hot as you can bear it:
25until you’ve used all the water up:
this old-fashioned stuff beats antibiotics
if it works, but doesn’t if it doesn’t.
1984 (2000)
Spills
after bridge work, so many abutments, crowns,
underpasses, cantilevers, my dentist, carried
away into gold and porcelain, regards sternly
flesh and bone that
swims underneath,
_________
5his structures abstract grins at the soft
permissions of natural law:
these bridges float
over their rivers (time) in flood, the shores
wash, the bridges gaggle about and down the
10river they, too, ride, only to be found at
last cool and dry in the ashes someone in
a dwindled morning worries about flushing down
the toilet:
what is pluralism but something not
15yet added up: what one wants is pluralism
overwhelmed with unity and unity overwhelmed
with pluralism: overwhelmed:
could each drop
of the stitch be a change of subject or is that
20too noticeable: aren’t changes of subject
more telling when they jostle in by surprise
and yet is it not a signal writer
and reader can share, a peachy way of saying,
my dear, we have gone on: cracks in the
25layering, is that appealing, or not: where
the workman slipped or tragedy found another
venue and view:
I wonder if certain (I mean, uncertain)
questions are proper; for example, does God
30exist: well, of course, I rely on faith, but
_________
the only proper answer is, yes: you couldn’t
say maybe, where would that put you (or God),
and you couldn’t say no, because then how could
you account for the presence of things or absence: so,
35we, no, you can’t ask a question when there are
no choices for answer: I was thinking, tho,
the other day that it may have been comparatively
easy to make things, but it must have been hard
to make nothing, especially if nothing
40was already there before: was it some other
kind of nothing or was there this big block of
something that nothing was made inside of or
even that nothing was made of:
adjacencies,
45juxtapositions, sprinkles, drifts, plasmic
slurs, smears, addled lines, clusters, how
many shapes clear and at the edge of perceiving,
all these hiding the rhombus, triangle, square,
our clarities drawn into the rondures,
50wash-outs: here, I say, I impose the strict,
till an earthwave tumble my tinkerings as
into a river-rush: still, we have held on
well (at least we hold till the visible
from the sky suddenly appear): squiggles,
55afterthoughts:
should a tiger come down from
_________
the hills and snarl at the mighty who write
bad verses—senators, presidents, famous
actors—and sell them broadly to the innocent[,]
60we little people buying their poverty with
enrichment: meanwhile, we littles wangle and
bangle our tunes, good and bad, to one or two
or none, till we turn out a small person who
beyond all station moves the deep wide into
65the cosmic reach:
I’m just an old man in a gelded
cage.
1998 (2000)
A Regular Mess
I took (drove my Toyota) a jug of my one-day’s
urine up the road to the Care Center this
morning early, the snow hardly heavier than a
crust of rime, the cushionest grit: this, I
5said to the lady, the nurse, all in white,
hair a little creamier, is my creatinine test
results: fill in this form, she said: I sd,
I filled it out yesterday, one like it: well,
she said, fill out another one: then she
10picked up my full bottle-jug and said, you are
very generous: she said, some people come in
here with about that much (very little) from
_________
a whole day’s effort, you are really generous:
I said, yeah, that’s without any beers, too:
15I felt proud: but I recalled the doctor had
said, it’s not the quantity, it’s the quality:
so now I must wait to see if I did a whole lot
of something good or a whole lot of something
bad, perhaps intermediate: I liked her, the
20lady in white, a little on the old side but
young enough for me: old people don’t see
much age in old people’s faces: they see a
young woman in a wreck: so then she came
back from the refrigerator where she stored my
25generosity and said, you have to have a blood
test, too, a comprehensive Profile: Jesus, I
said, I just had a egg, ten minutes ago, does
that make any difference: well, well, well,
maybe so: better come in tomorrow morning,
30nothing to eat, no coffee, just water: I’ll
be here, I said, at seven: if I don’t see you
she said, have happy holidays: it was so fine
outside, the sun broken through on the crisp
snow, a good grip for the soles, no other
35footprints around, just mine coming in . . .
1997 (2000)
APPENDIX B:
Poems Posthumously Published
Mule
The mule, though
sexed, is sterile as angels,
dull, tranquil:
hardworking (steady to no joy)
5long-eared, flopping
grace
measuring the plodding pace:
will strain in swamps,
put belly to ground—
10chained to tonged logs, veins
rising like moleways
toward the heart:
if the log does not
give, the trace must
15break: the driver cries:
the log
sucks, rides: windbroken,
the mule’s sold cheap to sandy
farm and light feed:
20stiff or old, whipped,
must move or die:
should the pulled hip fail,
is led hopping to the field’s
back edge and
25shot: the grave to dig then!
in human sweat’s atonement,
the mule glistens
out of decay-oiled hide and,
trampling the air, kicks
30up heels in
the shine-fields of galaxies
still unfound.
1960
For Edwin Wilson
Did wind and wave design the albatross’s wing,
honed compliances: or is it effrontery to
suggest that the wing designed the gales and
seas: are we guests here, then, with all
5the guest’s gratitude and soft-walking:
provisions and endurances of riverbeds,
mountain shoulders, windings through of tulip
poplar, grass, and sweet-frosted foxgrape:
are we to come into these and leave them as
10they are: are the rivers in us, and the slopes,
ours that the world’s imitate, or are we
mirrorments merely of a high designing aloof
and generous as a host to us: what would
become of us if we declined and staked out
15a level affirmation of our own: we wind
the brook into our settlement and husband the
wind to our sails and blades: what is to
be grateful when let alone to itself, as for
a holiday in naturalness: the albatross
20fishes complyingly the waves with a will beyond
the waves’ will, a
nd we, to our own doings, put
down the rising of sea- or mountain slope: except
we do not finally put it down: still, till
