by A. R. Ammons
nearly original are things like being part of
the web of human relations, wherein, for
example, we used to be tobacco growers, and
my mother, a religious person, hated tobacco
anyhow, but it would have killed her to know
she was killing people, something not known
way back then: but I, I brought the green
leaves up from the field by a Silver-drawn
sled, poor mule: but lately I advised a man
to stop smoking, and he did, but he gained
twenty pounds and ran into diabetes and high
blood pressure: put that in your pipe and
—no, no: that’s what I mean: get down
on your knees and ask to be excused because
there isn’t a damn thing you can do about much
of the damage you do: pray, brother, pray,
and join the praying crowd. . . .
Auditions
So there we were eating feathered dinosaur
meat for Sunday dinner and expecting the
return of Jesus Christ any minute: looking
forward to the return when, by the way, highly
disturbing reorientations would be invoked:
graves we had held still with rows of clam
shells would blast open and actual grandmothers
and grandpappies would flare up midair in musty
spiritual clothes and go off with the Lord: &
others of us, some in overalls, some in
sack-print dresses, would just be given the old
go-ahead: nobody left behind to look after the
little dinosaur biddies or Silver, poor
thing, shut up braying and whinnying in the
stable: the certainty of all this seemed to
me, even as a kid woozy on the edge of question,
to sort poorly with the advisability: I didn’t
care that much, though, about disrupting
farming: good Lord, worming tobacco, digging
up manure, lugging slops: (October is a
lost April): (a matter of leaves, coming
green or going gold, leaves and comings): I
was so full of poetry this morning, the rose
leaves of the maple tree reflected by the
rising light back onto the hardwood floors, and
stuff, I starved myself at the piano with a
haunting tune (of my own composition) and that
just about brought tears to my wife’s eyes,
and she was all the way back in the bathroom
fixing up to go off to the Farmers’ Market:
but there is the frost on the ground: who can
be rich, really, except in grief, water turned
against everything it nourished, the sweet
fluid become splintery, furry with death-
spicules: the big chrysanthemum bunch,
somewhat compromised, the hanging impatiens,
shot (my floozy neighbor said, impatiens is
not gardening), the nasturtiums, really worse
off: but the fire bushes, the flame bushes,
have you noticed them: when the chlorophyll
goes, a red redder than the reddest rose
burns them up! how exciting, how like the
world’s brightest fucking blood: sensual
grief: the old cliches of time: time that
seems so insubstantial, so weightless, how can
it haul so much stuff off, where are the
grappling hooks, the sliders and rollers, the
lifters and blowers-away, alas.
Between Each Song
I once would have said my sister Vida but now
I can just say my sister because the other
sister is gone: you didn’t know Mona, lovely
and marvelous Mona, so you can’t feel the
flooded solar plexus that grips me now: but
you may know (I don’t know if I hope you will
or hope you won’t—tossups between having and
holding) but you may know someone of your own
I don’t quite know the pang for as you do: I
know but don’t believe Mona is gone: she is
still so much with me, I can hardly tell I lost
anything when I lost so much: love is a very
strange winding about when it gets lost in
your body and especially when it can’t find
the place to go to, the place it used to find: Mona is
in my heart in a way that burns my chest until
my eyes water: are you that way: even in the
midst of business I could think of caring for
you for that: but my sister Vida and I used
to have to daub (we called it dob) the baccer
barn: cracks between the uneven-log sides
had to be filled airtight with clay so the
furnace and flues could “cure” the tobacco
with slow, then high heat: we would dig a
bucket of clay from the ditch by the road
where streaks of white and red clay ran, add
water for a thick consistency, then climb the
rafters inside the barn and dob the cracks:
can you imagine: kids: (perhaps it beat
empty streets filled with drugs): I REALLY
THINK WE SHOULD GET IT OFF OR GET OFF IT
Mina de Oro
Old fools, you know, can’t tell where they are
sometimes: they lose track of what is serious:
(when it comes to the stock market, I don’t
count my chickens even after they hatch:
trends in the night can sweep the coops away:
excessive liquidity sloshes in great swells
around the planet, gullywashing some guys and
washing some others up onto the shores of
splendor: great mounds of money generated
from money, money free of any derivation from
commodity, can just send frail craft into a
tizzy of bobbing: but, of course, if you
catch a swell right and ride in with the combers
you can be deposited on material shore
safely): (but, you know, them brokers and
flimflam artists, them slick journalists and
fee seekers, they start up a wind, like a
typhoon of love of money (yo money), and the
liquidity break your dam down and wash all yo
money out in the street: you have to watch
them fasttalkers, they know what the weather’s
like, and they changes it the way they want it:
put a little money in something conservative,
maybe a bond fund or a little bit of a stock
fund: how about a municipal: if you going to
branch out, get a little GE, a touch of AT&T,
and a couple of pharmaceuticals: look out for
them highflying IPO’s and you better keep yo
mouth shut cause somebody gonna find out you
got a dollar left:) my father said one time
this old man lost his sow, she ran off, and
he saw her tracks where she trotted by this
old ditch: so he hid out behind some bushes
one evening and about dark he heard something coming
and when it got close he jumped out of the
bushes right onto the old sow’s back, but it
turned out it was a bear, and the bear took
off, just lit out, don’t you know: that’s
what he said anyhow.
Widespread Implications
How sweetly now like a boy I dawdle by ditches,
broken rocky brooks that clear streams through
the golden leaves: the light so bright from
the leaves still up, scarlet screaming vines
lining old growths high or rounding domes of
> sumac: how like a sail set out from harbor
hitting the winds I flounder this way and that
for the steady dealing in the variable time;
old boys are young boys again, peeing arcs
the pleasantest use of their innocence, up
against trees or into boles, rock hollows or
into already running water! returned from
the differentiation of manhood almost back to
the woman: attached but hinge-loose, flappy,
uncalled for and uncalled, the careless way
off into nothingness: where, though, but in
nothingness can the brilliance more brightly
abide, the ripple in a brook-warp as gorgeously
blank as a galaxy: I dropped the mouse,
elegantly supersmall, from the trap out by the
back sagebush, and all day his precious little
tooth shone white, his nose barely dipped in
blood: he lay belly up snow white in the
golden October morn, but this morning, the
next, whatever prowls the night has taken him
away, a dear morsel that meant to winter
here with us.
Above the Fray Is Only Thin Air
How do you account for things: take night
before last, a dry night, still, leaves from
the maple by the driveway worked a solid
semicircle on the driveway, really pretty but
thick: I raked it up in the afternoon: but
last night around midnight a drizzle that
turned slowly into a quiet rain started and
kept up till day and after day: but not more
than a few leaves fell, and plenty are still on
the tree: except right at the tip of some
branches, now stick sprays, where, by the way,
the hornets’ nest rides right out in the open,
stiller than a balloon: but, I mean, why
didn’t the weighted wet leaves come down, even
in bigger droves than on the dry night: my theory
founded on guesswork is that the dry night got
so dry it got crisp, and crisp cracked off the
stems from the branches: and so the leaves
just fell off: they didn’t need any breeze or
rain: is that wonderful: do you suppose it’s
so: who knows: maybe the night of the crisp
fall was really no more than a bear climbing
up there and shivering the tree, shaking them
down: I would just as soon know the answer to
some things as how a galaxy turns. . . .
Home Fires
I don’t know how big I’ll be tomorrow, you
know TOMORROW, but I wasn’t much yesterday:
now I am more than I ever thought I would be
and that is fine with me, even if TOMORROW
I will be more (or less) because in many
pertinent ways I’ll be far less TOMORROW than
I am today: know what I’m saying: I’m saying
it’s okay: it is better to be first at the
finish line than finished at the first line
(tho that is hardly worse than last at the
last line, unless, of course, that’s the
grave’s rim, in which case one would not wish
to be first in any case, unless, as in some
natural disaster—an asteroid or an
artificial plane down—you might want to be
the first to go): if you go, here is a little
poem I have written for you . . .
Chez Vous
I don’t
know
where you’re
coming
from but
it’s
no place
I
care to
visit
Pudding Bush Sopping Wet
Every now and then when I’m writing poetry I
decide to write a poem: here following is one
of my recent efforts:
Hierarchy
The lard
above,
the fat
guy,
the big
cheese
a poem repetition hampers: three times the
poem tries to get off, only to be hauled down
and started over, or continued in the same way:
but on the other hand that kind of repetitive
punching socks the point home: try another
one . . .
Nip Sipper
If you
stagger it
ought not
to be
just because
you’re old
this one is, of course, very clever and
alludes to the history of western civilization
also to domestic abuse and also to persons
unmentionable in high office dealing with
significant affairs: but since my poems strive
to dislocate themselves from social affairs,
I play connections diffidently: it is
preferable to be an important poet by not
saying anything.
Spew
Somewhere out toward the tip of the downswinging
limberest limb the hornets attached their
sturdiest chance: so now the nest (not heavy
as a big mango which would crack off the branch)
like a paperlight airship bounds in the
thunderstorms but holds for the fair stillnesses:
(my point in all this is isn’t it odd that the
hornets know to seek security (and safety) in
the most givingly insecure settings): (how &
whether to apply this to human affairs, who
knows how or whether): as for me turned out
to pasture like an old mule, I graze among the
skimpy thoughts for energy to keep me standing
up, however rickety, however far down the reach
to the little feed: I remember this farmer had
25 mules when tractors came along and the
stalls of the stable emptied and two tractors
sat there instead all winter, eating nothing:
except for one old stiff mule, Pet, she was:
they just let her out to graze, never to be
called for or hitched up again: I can see her
now nibbling out on a pasture rise and thinking
to myself well, there you are: here near the end of
August, my wife’s hostas (as in, hosta la vista)
have spindled up into white shoots of bloom,
some opening, some open, some closing, a long
list of a serial event, so good for a cloudy
morning: I can’t write any more “poems” like
this poem I’m writing: I’ve “done” too many
already: who dwelling over the WWW can find in
my poor pasture whatever but nettles, sourweed,
and an occasional chicken snake—
Vomit
When I went out in the dewy morning this
morning to see the hanging nasturtium, often
dry if it doesn’t rain, there was a cool
cicada sitting right there inside the rim of
the pot: what, I said, and nudged him with my
pen, but I suppose not having been in song, he
was asleep or spent or dead, mercy: he looked
so big, the black-veined clear wings extending
behind him, but I just now went out there again,
say, noon, and he isn’t there: I do hear a
cicada, though, up in a pine, I think, and it
may be he: or she: the sun is shining, the
front has passed through, the humidity has
dried up: it is at once cool and warm: I have
eaten a bellyful of fruit: also, a piece of
pound cake and milk: also hummus
Thoughts
I was reading in the World Book about A. E.
Housman wherein it was reported that he died
and was buried, so I said to myself, “Well,
Al, we know you’re there, but you don’t know
we’re here,” and that seemed to screw up the
strivings for immortality: no use to be
immortal in the bodies of others while one’s
own body molds away or flakes off in pasty
chunks: this is a version of an old thought
of mine: one forgets before one is forgotten,
so don’t worry about being remembered, just
worry about being, that’s something to worry
about: so, Housey, I wish you could have
gotten what you wanted out of life: but the
other fellow had a right to get what he
wanted (or try to get what he wanted) out of
life, and since that wasn’t what you wanted
well, there you go, but we know where you’re at:
in fact, tho, A.E., you’re not in your grave,
not the real you: whatever of the real you
is left is here with us: you’re here with
us, in a sense: the grave holds nothing, or
what soon will be: but no one, now, dead or
alive can hold you in his arms and dry your eyes
Spit
Thinking I’d better be prepared when I went
out to meet the ocean, I blew myself up but
burst in time: so the next morning,
actually nearly before light, I converted
myself into a ghost crab, peeked out of my hole
over the sand, and there it was, the whole
wide thing, gray as the morning and on no
business but its own: when it washed over me
I waited, sealed off, underground until it
washed away: then I came out and the
ocean had become itself again: even so, the
sight burst my horizon: women’s preferences
evolve the form of man, I’m told, a pretty
lousy trail of taste, the women apparently
wanting strength but not too much, independence
but heavily nurtured, paunches, wheezes, and
some broken-down feet: men, though, choose
women, too, but hardly a shriveled-up old
