The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2
Page 74
the host appear, we’ll playact the master here.
1974
For Emily Wilson
Such a long time as the wave idling gathers
lofts and presses forward into the curvature
of the height before one realizes that the
tension completes itself with a fall through air,
5disorganization the prelude to the meandering
of another gather and hurl, the necessary:
what can one make to absorb the astonishment:
you should have seen me the merchant at market
this morning: the people ogled me with severe
10goggles: maids, buying in manners and measures
beyond themselves, stared into my goods and
then grew horror-eyed: wives still as distant
from day as a carrot from dinner took the
misconnection sagely, a usual patience:
15peashells, I said, long silky peashells: cobs,
I said, long cobs: husks and shucks, I said:
one concerned person pointed out that my whole
economy was wrong; yes, I said, but I have
nothing else to sell: and I said to her, won’t
20you appreciate the silky beds where seeds
have lain: she had not come to that: and
how about this residence all the grains have
left: won’t you buy it and think about it:
not for dinner, she said: rinds, I cried,
25rinds and peelings: there was some interest
in those, as for a marmalade, but no one willing,
finally, to do the preparations: absurd, one
_________
woman shouted, and then I grew serious: can you
do with that: but she was off before we fully
30met: you should have seen me the merchant at
market this morning: will bankruptcy make a
go of it: will the leavings be left only: the
wave turns over and does not rise again, that wave.
1974
Making Fields
My father said the meat came off the insides of his father’s hands,
said his father working the tar kilns would of a freezing morning
burn his hands raw on the hauling chains,
the chains sticky with cold, I don’t know what job my father said
5my grandfather was doing, I saw a tar kiln once, though, it was
a burial, fat-lightered slabs laid together in a deep coffin,
buried over, set afire at one end for a muffled burn,
black drops of tar oozing out into a catch basin, I was too young,
maybe I never really saw one but heard of it
10also my grandfather (who gave my older sister an apple one day when
she was three, she remembers) got drunk occasionally and, one time,
in Whiteville (then known as Vinland) North Carolina, one
time my grandfather poured a pint down his ox’s throat and the fool
ox spun the wheels off the cart leaping and farting the
15whole four miles home, my grandfather, they say, meanwhile,
standing in the front of the cart and hooting and yelling round
the curves
they say my grandfather was all man, he raised thirteen children on
a small farm he dug out of the woods, he laid out ditches and fencerows,
20he had peacocks, guinea chickens, turkeys, geese, cows, hogs
(the hogs and cows free-ranged, the fields fenced in)
when my father lay quiet with his stroke, I came to sit by him, but
he knew, having sat by his father, too, and stopped eating: dying
fathers despise the solicitude of their sons, death
25more rigorous than the wandering eyes of caring, but my father,
they say, was like his father, he could call leatherbritches
half a hour away walking home, and my mother could get a tater
and a piece of meat ready for him by the time she could see him:
the land is not deep down but across, as into time; the runs, the
30ditch banks, the underbrush, the open fields with a persimmon tree
or wild cherry call, they call me.
1976
High Heaven
Our neighbors once buried a mule too
shallow out in a big field next to us,
and the dogs dug it up and the grave
hole, opened, became fringed with buzzards,
5the long, strangly necks good for
plunging into and dragging out or for
gulping long guts down: I never thought
the cluster of events remarkable for
being an appearance: the odor seemed
10not to depend on whether it seemed to
be there or not: in time, distributions
and cargoes settled, the scene dried up,
and sand or a new plowing did away with
the hump and the hole in the ground, but
15long afterwards I seemed to smell the punctured
bloat of that old disappearing mule.
c. 1975–1990
MotionShape
The wonder isn’t that a poem, looked into,
stalled, comes undone, its glue
cracking dry or mortised, its parts mis-referring
to parts, its semantic gibberish:
5the wonder is that the poem assembles
the rubble of spent use, the splinters of
defining, and picking up speed, whirls
detritus into show-whorls of
shape and effect: the still-spinning,
10the held figures write spells through air and
across the ground: motion assimilates meaning:
looked into, the poem parts from itself, from us.
1993
Woman
I laid out my finest spool cloth, silkier
than algae, my rubies bleeding light,
crunched up high in encroaching ice, misty
gold strings, spangling sapphires,
5and you said, Is this what you were
talking about, knotty silk,
stones clacking like plastic, emeralds
webby? This is the best
I can do, I said: so I gathered up my
10goods and just because they were mine
blood came back into the rubies and the
emeralds cleared silky-sea deep.
c. 1980–2000
Red Edges
Miscalculation gives calculation another turn
into surprise: so goes it: for example, when
I was a young man, I tended strange textures
but finding myself way off, I turned back over
5a long industry to you but you turned away from
me as just another one of you and preferred my
early weaving wild: what is best, to be
undefined in a wide definition or to stand out,
a startlement of etched coloration: or take
10a newspaper given to misprints and errors of
fact: readers generously correct the misprint
and overlook the errors of fact, reading on
eagerly in their own blazed trail: but if the
newspaper shapes up and gains a reputation for
15errorlessness, readers on finding fault will
be cast into confused illumination: what’s a
newspaper to do: do the best it can short of
very well, you ask: waste little money on
proofers: some grades slight, some steep, in
20some the way bends straight up (in dreams) till
one clings to the ridge only to look over into
a breathlessly deep valley: with variables
_________
old men can walk slowly and uphill get into
beneficial breathing, recuperating downhill,
25and people, onset diabetic, can in hal
f an hour
break a sweat slow paced which as anybody knows
releases insulin, an upgrade in body heat the
best stimulant: old men plunge their remnant
bit of time like a cork into the ocean but
30catch no silvery hours, not even minnows
of minutes: but the cork, that is hope where
there is no hope, oh, yes, when will the next
whale be along and swallow a terminus away:
my dentist has built me enough bridges to
35grid the Mississippi—and fund the next
election: and I’m proud to say I can chew a
banana and sup soup and, following a thirty
minute soak—slurp shredded wheat: and my
teeth look great: they are solidly enough
40anchored that I don’t have to click them
into place, and when I talk they
don’t rustle up blubbering speech: someday
though as a part of losing everything I will
lose them and one good thing is my gums will
45ridge razor sharp and I’ll do even better with
the bananas but look a little squooshier myself
in the jaws: I saw this old woman sluice down
hunks of chicken like she had a full set: you
_________
can’t imagine how improvement goes on mixing
50with disaster right on up until the last minute
whose improvement, by the way, may be a sufficient
overdose: don’t be discouraged, I say: in
mal tiempo, buena cara: (thought I was dumb,
didn’t you): I declare my back has been hurting
55me something awful the last few days, specially
on that drive to Teaneck: didn’t hurt a bit
that night but the next day I’m sidelined by a
traffic jam in Bloomfield, it was hurting like
hell when I got out at the gas station to fill
60the tank: it’s no use to ask directions at a
gas station in town—what old language is
going to come hurtling out of it: not that
the fillers don’t sometimes know the way, they just
don’t know the way to tell you the way: you
65might as well do what Emerson did (said do) &
rely on yourself: when we got to the ocean in
Ocean City we had Kohr Bros frozen custard on
the boardwalk and you can bet we were glad we
oozed through all those traffic jams: if I had
70to do it over, I would bypass Teaneck and head
straight for Kohr Bros. . . . you can just bet
your bottom on that, dollar, I mean: what’s
missing in my life: what isn’t: oh, yeah,
it’s true, I have everything: I’m glad I do:
_________
75but running down the center of things is this
streak of nothingness like a sewer pipe: sir,
is there not even a rat running up and down
your tube eating and screwing and raising rats:
are there no fleas, no interesting diseases:
80pestilences, plagues: (there no longer occur
to me big ideas that unify the world, the big
unifier nearby not even small differences can
evade): so this guy at the complimentary breakfast
was enjoying a commercial (kids pounding
85things) when he turned around and said he was
from the Bronx, and I said, well what are you
doing down here (Somers Point) and he said he
came down the Garden State Parkway to do a
little shopping where the sales tax was lower:
90what baloney, I bet you: he was here for the
casinos: anyway, he had on a nice jacket and
it was a brilliant day—god, I loved it:
Days Inn was never better: clean, plenty of
fresh coffee all day, popcorn, cereals, etc.
95gee whillikers, getting out is so much fun,
traffic jams along the Schuylkill, ruins in
the love, little pockets of hell, neat
challenges, salt, savory.
1997
Core Sample
slender means as
with caterpillar
silk
or
5fence wire wield
weights and
volumes
oh, look, a thread
a thread is here
10it is
working down
into yarns—no, no
it is rising
up, a rising, a
15wheat
shaft, it is head
ing up, say,
lyric with
light, a narrative
20of the wagging
world—
seriously, tho,
no, this thread,
given me by
25fans also friends
is called a “38
mm BOND ROLL, for
use on
plain paper
30calculators”: I
think it
my skinniest
evisceration: in
a poem
35such as this how
great it would be
(as it wd in li
fe) to go back &
change things,
40correct, augment,
undo, efface: a
briery past, tho,
can add scratch to
your future, in
45case bungee jumps
won’t
fill your void:
of course, you’re
afraid
50to die but the
pain at the end
can make you glad
you can: it’s
hard to consider
55that now that
you’re feeling
good, but just
let the inroading
screams start and
60visions of paradi
se elsewhere
enfoliate your
dreams: you’ll
want to go: (I
65should mix up some
stuff like paint
on the side and
then enter it into
the piece: who
70would know: am I
being watched:
if I’m watching,
I’m being watched
so can I make a
75deal or shd I put
the paint straight
on:)
the gook-innards
of the pipes
80dried hard while
we’ve been (4 mos)
away, so the
minute
we ground things
85down the drain the
drain stopped up,
slush sticking
fast on stiff
sludge: we had
90to call
the brain drain,
no the Drain
Brain ($80) to
clear a way thru:
95this is my little
sizzling stick to
try to rustle up
some stir in my
creativity, so as
100to get moving
again: I’m
stiffer than dry
grease: I’m a
hardened
105piece of scuzz:
I’m a drained
drainpipe coated
inside with
amberized spicules
110& needle pricks:
I don’t give a
damn about anything
maybe it’s the
Zoloft, sweet
115goodness: poetry
is like a poor
pitiful donkey’s
backbone bearing
on either side
120soggy bags of
wonder the asses
balk: nothing
improves with
125cleansing lightness
a poor old
naked-boned
winded donkey:
this poor thing,
130verse,
hauls stuff away:
– – – – – – – – –
I’m afraid to cum
here to the roll:
135I’m afraid I won’t
do well, I’ll
sound like the
corn rows whereas
I’m a weed: I’ll
140seem to aspire to
big ears or,
earlier, spangled
tassels, or long
damp silk: I’m
145just something so
close to the
hedgerow or ditch
the plow couldn’t
get to me: I’m
150like hardweed,
flowerless,
small-nutted, not
unfavored but
disfavored,
155despised, shut out,
cut down (by the
remorseless mower)