by A. R. Ammons
A. R. Ammons
Bosh and Flapdoodle
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Contents
Fasting
Reverse Reserve and You Have Reverse
Surface Effects
Aubade
Oil Ode
America
In View of the Fact
Get Over It
Tail Tales
Fuel to the Fire, Ice to the Floe
Suet Pudding, Spotted Dick
Focal Lengths
Sibley Hall
Good God
Genetic Counseling
Hooliganism
Slacking Off
Quibbling the Colossal
Informing Dynamics
Pyroclastic Flows
Odd Man Out
Squall Lines
John Henry
Rogue Elephant
Mouvance
Called Into Play
Back-Burnerd
A Few Acres of Shiny Water
“They said today would be partly cloudy”
Feint Praise
Surfacing Surface Effects
Free One, Get One By
Dumb Clucks
Sucking Flies
Balsam Firs
Tree-Limbs Down
Wetter Beather
The Gushworks
Body Marks
Yonderwards
Depressed Areas
Dishes and Dashes
Auditions
Between Each Song
Mina de Oro
Widespread Implications
Above the Fray Is Only Thin Air
Home Fires
Pudding Bush Sopping Wet
Spew
Vomit
Thoughts
Spit
Lineage
Now Then
Shit Face
Surprising Elements
Out From Under
The Whole Situation
Rattling Freight Lines
That’s What I Just Got Through Saying
It Doesn’t Hold Water
Tom Fool
Ringadingding
I Wouldn’t Go So Far As to Say That
Thrown for a Loop
Wrong Road
Way Down Upon the Woodsy Roads
A Note of Appreciation
These poems were written in 1996, though my father continued to work on the collection until shortly before he died. No poems have been added or deleted. The order of the poems as well as the title of the book are his. The poems have been left exactly as Ammons wrote them. We have not attempted to change the spelling or sense of his words to conform with standard spelling or usage.
My mother and I are deeply grateful to friends and colleagues of my late father who encouraged us to publish the collection, among them, Mike Abrams, Roald Hoffmann, David Lehman, Ken McClane, Steve Tapscott, our agent Glen Hartley, Norton editor Jill Bialosky and her assistant, Sarah Moriarty, and Emily Wilson for her lively enthusiasm for Ammons’s poetry.
We are especially indebted to Roger Gilbert for his steadfast dedication and help with all aspects of the project, and to Helen Vendler, who so generously read the manuscript, for her guidance and warm response.
—John Ammons
Mill Valley, California
Bosh and Flapdoodle
Fasting
Not two months off till the shortest day, the
shadows near noon all flop over one way as if
it were soon to be dusk: that’s winter coming
all right, slanted over, long-casting, &
pale: the trees are suddenly bristled
stripped: did the sun steam a frost up and melt
the leaves: probably not: squirrels shook
the leaves out of the lofts: some (people)
are strict, spare, and pure; some strew gems
in the mud: I perforce raise the level of the
mud till it endows shining, like lake
ice or sunny water or like a distant field of
pumpkins, leafless and unpicked, or even like
the first rye fields against gray woods, so
bright green: hark, the jewels are lost in
the general rising, and the rare and priceless
are cheapened by white towers in a still-blue
day: of course, you can’t wear an image, a
windchurned figure from a volcano core, on
your finger, and some thoughts are too grand
to diadem a brain: (the tree by the road now
looks like a sketch for a tree): Halloween
needs what we have today—a stir: not a gale
so constant and high but gusts that show up
out of nowhere, presences that are not there,
little twirls of leaves that scoot across the
street and then just wilt out, forms,
air-whorls that are made out of nothing
but that touch your face or rustle into the
bushes, whispering and hissing: all kinds of
cases where motion charges the show
and where motion gives its form away by
picking up miscellany and throwing it off, motion
the closest cousin to spirit and spirit the
closest neighbor to the other world, haunted
with possibility, hope, anguish, and alarm.
Reverse Reserve and You Have Reverse
This morning, with small swirls of the season’s
first snowflakes dropping and rising in the
air, a bushy black dog, his head high, his
tongue aloll, his tail also high, comes down
the street: lost, he looks wildly all around,
turns into and out of driveways, reverses
his run and goes back to places as unfamiliar
as if he had never come through them: my wife
has lost her taste for eggs: she would rather
have a piece of toast with raspberry jam and
a little (real) butter than over, scrambled,
poached or boiled hard: I ask her, where has
the taste gone, but it’s just like losing yr
dog, she doesn’t know where it is: eggs in
popovers are still found in her taste: she
just loves popovers, with jam, I mean, and
a little (real) butter: cultural conditioning
has changed us so we have to look at the apes,
the gorillas, chimps, and babs to see what a
little cultural conditioning does: if we
didn’t have cultural conditioning, we males
would (as we sometimes still do) soften up the
females with attention or pursuit to bend them to
the primary imperative: for baboons, you
know, females, wouldn’t want an infant swinging
from their belly or arms or riding on their
backs if it wasn’t for estrus compelling them:
we already know that women prefer romance and
cuddling to anything invasive: whereas, we
males desire above all to get it in and get
rid of it: sometimes women will snarl, fake
headaches, pretend to be asleep because who
wants to risk her life having babies and lose
her life taking care of them, you might say:
so males have to hold them up a little into
mindless obedience so the sperm can run: of
course, we are so cultivated now that the
woman can stand right in the kitchen and
refuse to get on the table: where does that
leave the urgent one with his outstanding
without doubt the sharpness of male need that
perpetuates the species (which, truly, might
better be left alone):
RULLY OUSTSTANDING
Surface Effects
Nature, you know, is not a one-way street: its
most consistent figure is turning—turning
back, turning in, turning around: why?, because
it has nowhere to go but into itself: all its
motions are intermediate: if carrion turns
into flight (as it becomes in the wings of
buzzards) why it is not long before flight is
carrion again: of course, if nature is a
one-way street it is some kind of superlative
avenue, some large summary that takes its
account from time—that is, if time is a
one-way street: that is, if time, too, doesn’t
bend back into itself and start its intermediaries
over again: if, for example, dry years cause
the brook to cut its way one-sided, maybe that
deepens at least that narrow flow so fish can
get up the ledges to the pools and
sleepy shallows: or the worn-out ledge grist may
make a place downstream to put a willow in: so
nature, turning, does not turn on itself, for
whatever it turns into is nature anew: Mars,
desolate on the surface, doesn’t mind desolation:
Venus’s boiling stones are just a lit merriment:
the hillside, drenched by rain after wild
fires, doesn’t mind collapsing: what is wrong
for us is wrong for us; we may even
be wrong in reckoning it wrong; it may be
right, and we haven’t yet learned how: when
we correct wrongs, we may interfere with
the swing-around that will bring things right,
possibly righter than they were before:
don’t worry about nature: it is always nature:
when we divert water into California’s valley
deserts, we produce mucho melons, but we
leave the salty mouth of the Colorado dry: we
play our arrogances small scale: slowly we
learn that surplus carbon monoxide feeds a soil
microorganism: the large designs are filigrees
through which nearly still measures move, turn,
come and go again.
Aubade
They say, lose weight, change your lifestyle:
that’s, take the life out of your style and
the style out of your life: give up fats,
give up sweets, chew rabbit greens, raw: and
how about carrots: raw: also, wear your
hipbones out walking: we were designed for
times when breakfast was not always there, and
you had to walk a mile, maybe, for your first
berry or you had to chip off a flint before
you could dig up a root: and there were
times when like going off to a weight reduction
center you had a belly full of nothing: easy
to be skinny digesting bark: but here now at
the breakfast buffet or lavish brunch you’re
trapped between resistance and getting your
money’s worth and the net gain from that
transaction is about one pound more: hunting
and gathering is a better lifestyle than
resisting: resisting works up your nerves
not your appetite (already substantial in the
wild) and burns up fewer calories than the
activity arising from hunger pangs: all in
all this is a praise for modern life—who
wants to pick the subrealities from his teeth
every minute—but all this is just not what
we were designed for, bad as it was: any way
I go now I feel I’m going against nature, when
I feel so free with the ways and means, the
dynamics, the essentialities honed out clearly
from millions of years: sometimes when I say
“you” in my poems and appear to be addressing
the lord above, I’m personifying the contours
of the onhigh, the ways by which the world
works, however hard to see: for the onhigh
is every time the on low, too, and in the
middle: one lifts up one’s voice to the
lineations of singing and sings, in effect,
you, you are the one, the center, it is around
you that the comings and goings gather, you
are the before and after, the around and
through: in all your motions you are ever
still, constant as motion itself: there with
you we abide, abide the changes, abide the
dissolutions and recommencements of our very
selves, abide in your abiding: but, of course
I don’t mean “you” as anyone in particular
but I mean the center of motions millions of
years have taught us to seek: now, with
space travel and gene therapy that “you” has
moved out of the woods and rocks and streams
and traveled on out so far in space that it
rounds the whole and is, in a way, nowhere to
be found or congratulated, and so what is out
there dwells in our heads now as a bit of
yearning, maybe vestigial, and it is a yearning
like a painful sweetness, a nearly reachable
presence that nearly feels like love, something
we can put aside as we get up to rustle up a
little breakfast or contemplate a little
weight loss, or gladden the morning by getting
off to work. . . .
Oil Ode
My wife says that the two guys on TV say that
the most important thing is changing the oil:
and my wife says this friend of hers said go
over to Doug’s Fish Fry in Homer, they change
the oil often: and this fellow I met in a
factory once told a joke in which a guy sticks
up his middle finger to this lady and says,
check your oil? that is not very nice: I
mean, what could he do for her: just say,
lady, your oil’s fine: because what if it
wasn’t, could he replenish a drought: my
father’s friend once said he needed to “grease
his axle”: I think that was a dirty expression:
if not dirty, brutally suggestive and insulting,
and take that little gland in the reproductive
works of human males, the one that puts out a
bead of oil to promote penetration: tell me,
is that not as wonderful as an appearance in a
grotto: how did “myself” know that some
problem outside my body might arise that a
gland should be designed to help ease: a gland
in me to help me ease in her: take anything,
think about it, it blows up in wonder: now, I
can’t call this greaseshooter dirty, it’s so
splendid, but I don’t want anything to do with
it: I would rather think about the girl’s
collarbone than that and that bone: I just
tell you, it’s amazing: then, there’s oil and
vinegar, oilcloth, etc. but
THAT’S OIL, FOLKS
America
Eat anything: but hardly any: calories are
calories: olive oil, chocolate, nuts, raisins
—but don’t be deceived about carbohydrates
and fruits: eat enough and they will make you
as slick as butter (or really excellent chee
se,
say, parmesan, how delightful): but you may
eat as much of nothing as you please, believe
me: iceberg lettuce, celery stalks, sugarless
bran (watch carrots, they quickly turn to
sugar): you cannot get away with anything:
eat it and it is in you: so don’t eat it: &
don’t think you can eat it and wear it off
running or climbing: refuse the peanut butter
and sunflower butter and you can sit on your
butt all day and lose weight: down a few
ounces of heavyweight ice cream and
sweat your balls (if pertaining) off for hrs
to no, I say, no avail: so, eat lots of
nothing but little of anything: an occasional
piece of chocolate-chocolate cake will be all
right, why worry: lightning-lit, windswept
firelines scythed the prairies and strung
rivers of clearing through the hardwoods,
disaster renewal, smallish weeds and bushes
getting their seeds out, grazing attracting
rabbits and buffalo, the other big light
shining in steady. . . .
In View of the Fact
The people of my time are passing away: my
wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who
died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it’s
Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:
it was once weddings that came so thick and
fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:
now, it’s this that and the other and somebody
else gone or on the brink: well, we never
thought we would live forever (although we did)
and now it looks like we won’t: some of us
are losing a leg to diabetes, some don’t know
what they went downstairs for, some know that
a hired watchful person is around, some like
to touch the cane tip into something steady,
so nice: we have already lost so many,
brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our
address books for so long a slow scramble now
are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our
index cards for Christmases, birthdays,
Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:
at the same time we are getting used to so
many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip
to the ones left: we are not giving up on the
congestive heart failure or brain tumors, on
