Ammons - Briefings Poems Small and Easy

By the same author Ommateum Expressions of Sea Level Corsons Inlet Tape for the Turn of the Year Northfield Poems Selected Poems Uplands Poems Small and Easy A. R. AMMONS W W NORTON & COMPANY INC NEW YORK Copyright 1971 by A. R. Ammons
FIRST EDITION Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 70-119696 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published simultaneously in Canada
by George J.

McLeod Limited, Toronto for John Logan Contents Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. Acknowledgments I thank the editors of the following periodicals for first publishing the poems listed: Poetry: Cougar, This Bright Day, September Drift, Working Still, Dominion, Treaties, Project, Play, Countering, Square, Reversal, Admission, Mission, Cut the Grass, Pluralist, Here & Now. The Hudson Review: After Yesterday, Father, Poetics, Making, Round, Gain, Concerning the Exclusions of the Object. The New York Times: Center, Mechanics, Saying, Crevice. Epos: Event, This Black Rich Country, Look for My White Self. Lillabulero: Tight, Autumn Song, Medium. Southern Poetry Review: Wagons, Working with Tools, The Run-Through. Abraxas: The Quince Bush, The Confirmers. Accent: Sumerian, Hymn IV. Choice: Spinejacking. Modern Occasions: The City Limits. NEW: A & C Poetry: The Makers. pebble: Doubling the Nerve. pebble: Doubling the Nerve.

The poems Center, Mechanics, Saying, and Crevice 1968, 1969 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

A bird fills up the streamside bush with wasteful song, capsizes waterfall, mill run, and superhighway to songs improvident center lost in the green bush green answering bush: wind varies: the noon sun casts mesh refractions on the streams amber bottom and nothing at all gets, nothing gets caught at all. A clover blossoms a province: actually: florets cluster helical villages with visible streets: down the main arteries a ways leaffarms produce common sustenance: the kingbee when all is ready visits and tries the yellow-doored purplish houses for virgin sweet, feeds in winged spells, rumples everything, and leaves behind not as a gift or feeseed, seed. A clown kite, my self rustles up to any gust: warps & whucks the wind: O my blustering orange and striped green immensities! I get sometimes so good tickled at my self I slip flat down and windless make no show of grief. After yesterday afternoons strungled clouds and white rain the mockingbird in the backyard untied the drops from leaves and twigs with a long singing.

A leaf fallen is fallen throughout the universe and from the instant of its fall, for all time gone and to come:

A mountain risen in me I said this implacability must be met: so I climbed the peak: height shook and wind leaned I said what kind of country is this anyhow and rubbled down the slopes to small rock and scattered weed. A perspicuity like a sanctuary: against the pond a pavilion, led to by a glide of stairs, set right and accurately Applause is a shower to the watertable of self regard: in the downpour the watertables irrelevant but after the shower passes possibility takes on an extensive millimeter. Bees stopped on the rock and rubbed their headparts and wings rested then flew on: ants ran over the whitish greenish reddish plants that grow flat on rocks and people never see because nothing should grow on rocks: I looked out over the lake and beyond to the hills and trees and nothing was moving so I looked closely along the lakeside under the old leaves of rushes and around clumps of drygrass and life was everywhere so I went on sometimes whistling Branches broken, the clean meat at the branch knot turned out white, traveled by cleared white light: certain Consider big-city tensions rurally unwound, Currents figure you can see them they boil out of themselves & slice in from both sides a downward crease steady at the moving burial: Deprived like the cougar into heights Dispossess me of belief: between life and me obtrude no symbolic forms: Down by the bay I kept in mind at once the tips of all the rushleaves and so came to know balances cost and true: somewhere though in the whole field is the one tip I will someday lose out of mind and fall through. drought continuing the stems drop their leaves Earth, earth! day, this bright day againonce more showers of dry spruce gold, the poppy flopped broad open and delicate from its podonce more, all this again: Ive had many days here with these stones and leaves: like the sky, Ive taken on a color and am still: the grief of leaves, summer worms, huge blackant queens bulging from weatherboarding, all that will pass away from me that I will pass into, none of the grief cuts less now than everonly I have learned the sky, the day sky, the blue obliteration of radiance: the night sky, pregnant, lively, tumultuous, vastthe grief again in a higher scale of leaves and poppies: space, space and a grief of things. drought continuing the stems drop their leaves