by A.R. Ammons
Radiance comes from
on high and, staying,
sends down silk
lines to the flopping
marionette, me, but
love comes from
under the ruins and
sends the lumber up
limber into leaf that
touches so high it nearly
puts out the radiance
by A.R. Ammons
Praying answers prayer:
in the deep spells
of inquiry and hope,
a self
enabled to rise again
to the compromises
and the shattering caring
forms
by A.R. Ammons
Mercy’s so slight it’s like
a glitter-bit in granite or a single
pane-sun in snow flint or the warp-weave of
slice-light netting a shallows stone.
by A.R. Ammons
I’m to go see you tonight:
birds that know where to fly
are loose under my ribs:
your eyes fly here to my mind’s
eye: I dwell in them:
What if I’m frozen
When I see you; what if I burn
completely up: the birds
may break out and go
too soon; or, too bad
if my self flies to you
early, and I can’t follow.
by A.R. Ammons
A pollen
fly makes
so much
of sounding
like a
bee because
he has
no sting.
by A.R. Ammons
After a long
muggy
hanging
day
the raindrops
started so
sparse
the bumblebee
flew
between
them home.
by A.R. Ammons
Applause is a shower
to the watertable of
self-regard:
in the downpour
the watertable’s irrelevant
but after the shower passes
possibility takes on
an extensive millimeter.
hear me, O Lord, from the height of
the high place, where speaking is not
necessary to hearing and hearing is
in all languages: hear me, please,
have mercy, for I have hurt people,
though I think not much and where
much never intentionally and I have
accumulated a memory (and some heavy
fantasy) guilt-ridden and as a
nonreligious person, I have no way
to assuage, relieve, or forgive
myself: I work and work to try to
redeem old wrong with present good:
but I’m not even sure my good is good
or who it’s really for: I figure I
can be forgiven, nearly;, at least,
by forgiving, that is, by understanding
that others, too, are caught up in
flurries of passion, of anger and
resentment and, my, my, jealousy and
that coincidences and unintentional
accidents of unwinding ways can’t
be foreknown: what is started here,
say, cannot be told just where to
go and can’t be halted midway and
can’t, worst, be brought
back and started over: we are not,
O You, at the great height, whoever
you are or whatever, if anything, we
are not in charge, even though we
riddle localities with plans,
schemes, too, and devices, some of
them shameful or shameless: half-guilty
in most cases, sometimes in all, we
are half-guilty, and we live in
pain but may we suffer in your cool
presence, may we weep in your surround-
ing that already has understood:
we could not walk here without our
legs, and our feet kill, our
steps however careful: if you can
send no word silently healing. I
mean if it is not proper or realistic
to send word, actual lips saying
these broken sounds, why, may we be
allowed to suppose that we can work
this stuff out the best we can and
having felt out our sins to their
deepest definitions, may we walk with
you as along a line of trees, every
now and then your clarity and warmth
shattering across our shadowed way
A.R. Ammons
Creepy little creepers are insinuatingly
curling up my spine (bringing the message)
saying, Boy! are you writing that great poem
the world’s waiting for: don’t you know you
have an unaccomplished mission unaccomplished;
someone somewhere may be at this very moment
dying for the lack of what W.C. Williams says
you could (or somebody could) be giving: yeah?
so, these little messengers say, what do you
mean teaching school (teaching poetry and
poetry writing and wasting your time painting
sober little organic, meaningful pictures)
when values thought lost (but only scrambled into
disengagement) lie around demolished
and centerless because you (that’s me, boy)
haven’t elaborated everything in everybody’s
face, yet: on the other hand (I say to myself,
receiving the messengers and cutting them down)
who has done anything or am I likely to do
anything the world won’t twirl without: and
since SS’s enough money (I hope) to live
from now on on in elegance and simplicity–
or, maybe, just simplicity–why shouldn’t I
at my age (63) concentrate on chucking the
advancements and rehearsing the sweetness of
leisure, nonchalance, and small-time byways: couple
months ago, for example, I went all the way
from soy flakes (already roasted and pressed
and in need of an hour’s simmering boil
to be cooked) all the way to soybeans, the
pure golden pearls themselves, 65¢ lb. dry: they
have to be soaked overnight in water and they
have to be boiled slowly for six hours–but
they’re welfare cheap, are a complete protein,
more protein by weight than meat, more
calcium than milk, more lecithin than eggs,
and somewhere in there the oil that smoothes
stools, a great virtue: I need time and verve
to find out, now, about medicare/medicaid,
national osteoporosis week, gadabout tours,
hearing loss, homesharing programs, and choosing
good nutrition! for starters! why should I
be trying to write my flattest poem, now, for
whom, not for myself, for others?, posh, as I
have never said: Social Security can provide
the beans, soys enough my house, paid for for
twenty years, is paid for: my young’un
is raised: nothing one can pay cash for seems
very valuable: that reaches a high enough
benchmark for me–high enough that I wouldn’t
know what to do with anything beyond that, no
place to house it, park it, dock it, let it drift
down to: elegance and simplicity: I wonder
if we need those celestial guidance systems
striking mountaintops or if we need fuzzy
philosophy’s abstruse failed reasonings: isn’t
it simple and elegant enough to believe in
qualities, simplicity and elegance, pitch in a
little courage and generosity, a touch of
commitment, enough asceticism to prevent
fattening: moderation: elegant and simple
moderation: trees defined themselves (into
various definitions) through a dynamics of
struggle (hey, is the palaver rapping, yet?)
and so it is as if there were a genetic
recognition that a young tree would get up and
through only through taken space (parental
space not yielding at all, either) and, further:
so, trunks, accommodated to rising, to reaching
the high light and deep water, were slender
and fast moving, and this was okay because
one good thing about dense competition is that
if one succeeds with it one is buttressed by
crowding competitors, that is, there was little
room for branches, and just a tuft of green
possibility at the forests roof: but, now,
I mean, take my yard maple–put out in the free
and open–has overgrown, its trunk
split down from a high fork: wind has
twisted off the biggest, bottom branch: there
was, in fact, hardly any crowding and competition,
and the fat tree, unable to stop pouring it on,
overfed and overgrew and, now, again, its skin’s
broken into and disease may find it and bores
of one kind of another, and fungus: it just
goes to show you: moderation imposed is better
than no moderation at all: we tie into the
lives of those we love and our lives, then, go
as theirs go; their pain we can’t shake off;
their choices, often harming to themselves,
pour through our agitated sleep, swirl up as
no-nos in our dreams, we rise several times
in a night to walk about; we rise in the morning
to the crusty world headed nowhere, doorless:
our chests burn with anxiety and a river of
anguish defines rapids and straits in the pit of
our stomachs: how can we intercede and not
interfere: how can our love move more surroundingly,
convincingly than our premonitory advice
He sat down and
wept
because there is neither saying
nor unsaying,
wept the sunlight
free of leaves,
stitched up dandelions,
unsprinkled bluets,
broke birds'
songs down:
everything going on
went on
over, though, on over
his cold keep:
he hugged the heaving stone
tight.
(A.R. Ammons)
master bias leaning 