by A. R. Ammons
I mean, the Very Top, without object: so
our worship binds us into religious awe:
13
all the world’s a stage and the rest
of the universe the pits
14
145still, you know, the visionary is the
imagination peopled real: when the
coming together annihilates division into
nothingness, we require a representation
of what should have been there unifying
150all and so it becomes real and leaves
our minds and becomes our friend, our
great help, our one not limited by the
real real as are we yet like us—our own
15
DAMAGED BIRD SONG
155About ambivalence I’m ambivalent: that is
if you choose one wing or the other (for
purposes of clarity and identity) you can’t
fly, but if you cut off the extremity of
both wings you have either a stubby
160flight or you have to walk: but you do
have a complicated and accumulated middle
tight-bodied and still in balance: if the
attraction of the bilateral holds, fine!
16
beyond earthly forms, the utmost peak of
165the hierarchy is projected in dotted lines
and no visible closure is there
where everything comes together:
a projection into the nonphysical is
also beyond science, nothing to measure
170or weigh, so, friend, there is plenty of
room in the unfocusable for you to have
what you need: make it up: keep it up:
17
because I am not, therefore I think
18
there’s this bread (trade name withheld)
175that has two perfectly sized, beautifully
bronze-baked heels, can you imagine, whereas
most loaves (by others) have a skinny
split at the end with the next slice
catching the rest—such unevenness and
180unpredictability: but if you have two even
ends (as has the bread I’m speaking of)—
that is, if slicing commences from both
ends (so as to have a perfect start) what
happens when slicing meets in the middle:
185why is there no raggedness or superfine
thinness there: that is the question:
once again somehow somewhere yankee
_________
ingenuity has found a way to please and
sell, please and sell, compete and please:
19
190give your boss your all and he will give
you his: stand not apart into exception
or hidden device: this will fill you with
slicing fear and muddled loyalty: what a
boss who is a friend to friends: imagine
195the peace and trust and security, goodness!
20
a good worker who finds no evil practice
in his compartment gives his all, his
good will be at one with good: he may
even be promoted from the lower, difficult
200depths to middle management, even into
the invisible precincts of the upper
crust where lounging on golden couches
in the outdoors of tropical breezes the
truly elevated take their ease so sweetly
21
205if you choose to be angry, causes for anger
flare up all about you: if you choose
distrust, you will find nothing to put
your trust in: love binds itself to love:
hope is with the hopeful: faith allows
210belief to grow in the garden of possibility:
_________
so I say to you, choose to live in the
paradise of your own choosing: said & done
22
if you insist on truth where you see lies
you will endure hell but what will you
215have (which may seem little), will you not
carry with you the power of a high
adherence which will pour drops of ice
water or tonic water on your lips in hell
adherences overreach adherences so you may
220find in the highest regions the pure
unwinding of all difficulty into glowing
23
under this A-frame are many shelters,
cubicles, niches, prayer holes, and
spiritual pantries, subsets and subsets of
225subsets, oh, yes: oh, yes, oh, yes:
yes: come in under the definitions:
rest in the clear divisions: light life
in the ceremonial halls and naked byways:
just do your part to hold everything up so
230when the high winds come the joints stick
24
why then will some in the same symmetry
turn against others, managers, assistants,
perkers, fear and envy doing their dirty
work not their work, so that whole
235energies must be given to straightening
the lines and soothing or policing the
passions: the unruly are worms entering
the hives, and the combs heave loose, the
cells dry out of honey and young, mercy:
25
240who knows what the boss is thinking: is
there evidence or is it instinct: middle
of the night he decides to take the males
out early in the morning, all in a line
and everyone terrified of leopards and
245re-secure the boundaries: they go
bravely and slowly without feeding but with
the serious looks of what power must meet
and later, all done, they screech in the trees
26
frame within a frame within a frame within
250a frame past framing
27
the earth shudders, vomits, drowns, the
glaciers crawl scooping deep, avalanche
and mudslide—are we bugs leaping about
from leaf to leaf, subject to the blackout
255of a stony impingement: have we
established anything: why, what we cannot
put surely on the ground, we locate in
time permanently and return again
and again to build there, such as we are, what
1997
Spot Check
We old people sit, you know, we can’t see to
read: the print swims: by the time we make
out the words, we lose the sense: we don’t
want to lie down because lying down is what
_________
5made us want to sit up: we don’t look up
because light hurts the eyes, and if we can
listen we don’t listen because loud sounds
slice pain into our heads: we
let our eyelids drop and revue after revue
10plays across the backs of our lids,
girls and mill ponds and bicycles still
running: we don’t stand a lot except
to turn into or out of our wheels and as for
walking, walking is another way to get
15where we’re going: we line
up on the afternoon side of a closed-in porch,
put our brakes on, and snooze the minute the
sun touches our toes: we soak up all we
can of life because we have no time to waste:
20blobs of blubber, experienced nearly to death,
we nurture aboriginal sparks divine as
fire, but there is no laying on of wood in old
cave mouths or centers of circling settlements:
no thudding ringlets, no wails or s
narls of
25common voice: becoming ends and near the end
of becoming, the cries are a different kind,
the losses fall flat, a bushel of guts here,
a bald head there, and the mighty heaven rolls
by these shows too expensive to float anew:
30but fortunately we can’t get things
straight and don’t know which way they’re
going: who knows, sweetly convalescent we
may be taken home, with a risk though of
over-resting, we hurrying or hurried on.
1997
The Skimpy Side of Nothing
I’m (at least, provisionally) willing
to try somebody else’s plan, but which: is there
just one or one for everyone: is there one
for me and my buddy, Andrew: and what about
5my cousin, Giuseppe; I doubt that
there’s one cut-to-order for him:
and another big problem is if I
have my own plan, can somebody else help
me with it, or am I expected to figure it out
10myself: maybe no one has a finished
plan for everyone but a kind of central gappy
scaffolding unchanging that others
fill out themselves and build themselves around: a
comforting (if alarming) possibility
15is that there’s a plan already in us and it’s
none of our business; we follow it whether we
like or understand it or not:
rich rewards can follow risk,
and there’s plenty of that, so maybe the plan
20is that we should scramble about at high
_________
risk to make the treasure out: no
wonder the payoff can be as high as gold
streets and cleaned up angels, and I
wouldn’t risk missing that for anything
25except maybe for your eyes, sweetface, and
stand still, that smile.
1998
Other News
I don’t know who you think you are, I said to
the young editor, but it’s not who I think you
are: imagine, rejecting the poem I sent and
using another of mine instead without
5telling me! one (that’s me) would have to be
unhuffy not to resent it: I’m just a carcass:
the costs are building up around me like
baying creditors: I have spent the parts &
now the parts spend me: I have decided that
10giving up all the salvations, all the temporizing
remedies, only that will alert alive what
pleasure remains: the hipjoint bruised as
big as a farm hat again: neuropathy (of some
kind) tingling nerves that fail to access the
15waning muscles: a little slovenliness in the
tongue, once so brisk to wag: my hands on
these hard keys floppy as slabs of
overcooked mutton: everything high, blood,
_________
cholesterol, sugar, sucking me low: it is
20time at last, oh, at long last, to give myself
up to the insatiable verities: let them emerge
from their crevices and declare their rights:
I will make way: I will not hinder: no, I
will not hinder but, then, I will trust their
25ways to keep me longer than my trust: this old
man who walks the halls says, when you put
yourself down, God picks you up: and even if
you rise up a wraith, the sanctity of the great
dispositions visibly clothes you: the life
30given me was the kind that just burns you up:
the burning was bigger than I was: I couldn’t
turn it down low: but, oh, now, maybe, burned
out, besieged out of all direction, now I have
nowhere to go I will not be taken: my
35responsibilities about which I was, indeed, so
irresponsible, they are nothing more than
saying, yes, yes, I will come: though I wish
to stay and though I take the blame and tho
it was more than I could handle, okay, be as
40you must be, turn me here and there, oh, now
I see, the light is clearing, let’s go together,
let’s take the way. . . .
1998
Rap Sheet
Ophthalmic migraine, you say: well, the right
half of the page is legible, but the left part
blurs syntax; ink turns white,
just nothing doing, maybe a little trembling,
5like bulbs of clear jello: with me? oh, 20
minutes, no headache, no vomiting, it’s gone:
it makes you think, if you can’t rely on your
vision, what about visions: well, I
always assumed visions come from some other
10place than eyes, though don’t ask me how:
or you would think that once you had a vision
it would stabilize somewhere beyond this realm:
anyway, I am sorry to hear that most everything
even vision is subject to decay: if the brain
15can’t hold it, it isn’t there: pitiful: I
have a clear picture of that black water in
southern swamps where you can catch perch and ticks
and poison oak and malaria and horsefly bites
and moccasin bites: that picture stays as
20still with me as the water was: I can’t think
of anything I would rather be looking at when
I go than that: I’ll tell the doctor, doctor,
I’m looking on that black shiny water, it’s
okay now: but I can tell you about
_________
25my eyes, they have been so wonderful till
lately with the dissolving fields but even
between those spells just the most wonderful
eyes: it’s a marvel what all I’ve seen: I
suppose if my eyes though went bad, I could
30still turn up these pictures enough to last
lifetimes of consideration: in flesh but not
of flesh, wherever those pictures are, I could
see them with eyes not eyes, eyes migraines
couldn’t wobble, you, my dear, you, always
35you. . . .
1998
Frumpy Cronies
Is it possible my wife had heard in the next
room on TV someone mention cluster earrings
a few minutes before she said her headaches—
these fugitive little seizures about the
5brain—come in clusters: I said, how do you
mean clusters, and she said, you have them for
a few days, and then they go away: I said I
would like to come in clusters, such an awful
joke we both tried to laugh: my favorite word
10in that area is one my student Lisa Steinman
used to use in her poems—clumps: that is
so cool a word: I wish I could remember some
_________
of her lines, though I have not forgotten the
one about a messenger pigeon that got in some
15kind of accident but was coming up the lane
walking with a bandaged leg anyhow, the message
bound to the other leg: Lisa teaches
at Reed, now: a little bitty woman, she always
had three big sacks hanging off her various
20parts, books in some, supplies, I think, in
others for the 20-or-so member commune she was
forever taking the part of cooking for: what
a lovely, lovely poet she was and looking like
a touch of a clump herself: oh, my memories:
25they are so small and so
sweet: aphids, you
know, cluster: they get out toward the tips
where the greens are tender: and galloping
dominoes form little crusts, dark crusts, where
they suckle: and water beetles whirling on
30branch water will clump up into
swirls: galaxies, for heaven’s sake, they,
too, vaguely attract each other: not to make
too much of it, clumping sounds like something
suddenly falling together, I like that.
1998
Shuffled Marbles
Old men talk to anybody, or nobody, I
