Ammons - Brink Road

Also by A R Ammons Ommateum Expressions of Sea Level Corsons Inlet Tape for the Turn of the Year Northfield Poems Selected Poems Uplands Briefings Collected Poems: 19511971
(winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, 1973) Sphere: The Form of a Motion
(winner of the 19731974 Bollingen Prize in Poetry) Diversifications The Snow Poems Highgate Road The Selected Poems: 19511977 Selected Longer Poems A Coast of Trees
(winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 1981) Worldly Hopes Lake Effect Country The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition Sumerian Vistas The Really Short Poems Garbage
(winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, 1993) POEMS W. W. Norton & Company
New York London Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks.

Copyright 1996 by A. R. Ammons All rights reserved First published as a Norton paperback 1997 For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company; Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110. The text of this book is composed in 10.5 on 13.5 Adobe Garamond
with the display set in Futura Regular and Book
Composition by PennSet, Inc.

Book design and title page illustration by Margaret McCutcheon Wagner The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Ammons, A. R., 1926
Brink road / by A. R. Ammons,
p. cm. Title. Title.

PS3501.M6B75 1996
811.54dc20 95-42535 ISBN: 978-0-393-31597-4 ISBN: 978-1-324-00375-5 (ebk.) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10110 http://web.wwnorton.com W. W.

Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU for my wife and son I am grateful to the editors of the following periodicals for first publishing the poems listed: Abraxas : Tenures Pleasures American Poetry Review: Focus Beloit Poetry Journal: December Starlings Bluefish: A Pretty Looking Sight Chelsea Review: A Little Thing Like That, The Many Ways Not Supreme Columbia Review: Period Cornell Review: Enameling, Walking About in the Evening Epoch: Serpent Country The Gettysburg Review: Enfield Falls Grand Street : Sparklings, The Land of the Knobble-Jobble Tree, The Deep Slow The Grapevines Finger Lakes Magazine: High Desiring. The Hudson Review: Loving People, The Time Rate of Change, Blues in the Valley, Second-Rate Perfection, For My Beloved Son, Falls End, Summer Place Michigan Quarterly Review: Obsession, Lofty Calling, Weightlessness Moosehead Review: Changing Stations The New Republic: Boon, Putting On Airs The New Yorker: Sentiment, Ceppagna, Day Ghosts North Carolina Literary Review: Broad Brush, Flat Rock The Ohio Review: The Incomplete Life Panoply: Getting About Paris Review: Picking Up Equations, Modes Against Too Much, The Crystal Tree, Death and Silhouettes Partisan Review: Readings by Ways, Museums Pembroke Magazine: Regards Regardless, Evasive Actions, Superstars, Rosy Transients Poetry: Anxietys Prosody, An Improvisation for Soot and Suet, Alls All, Hard and Fast, Saying Saying Away, The Clenched-Jaw School, A Sense of Now, Local Antiquities, Collapsed Structures, The Deep End, Prey Raritan Review: Downing Lines Science: Microinscriptions Skylark: Ontology Precedes Teleology Southwest Review: A Part for the Whole The Southern Review: Reading Tao Chien St. Andrews Review: Pit Lines, Abscission (formerly, The Separation) Tar River Poetry: Strings, Prisons There and Not, Moving Figures this end up postcards: Establishment Times Literary Supplement: Chosen Roads Verse: Standing Light Up, Construing Deconstruction, Marginals Walking Magazine: Walking Song Yale Review: Middling Seasons, Whitewater, Spike-Tooth Harrows, The Damned Stand-In and Rarities appeared in a limited edition as companion broadsides by Larch Tree Press. My thanks to James Tyler. First Cold and Looking Way Off first appeared in the anthology Poems for a Small Planet. Brink Road lies off NY 96 between Candor and Catatonk.

CONTENTS Brink Road Rock frozen and fractured spills, a shambles, and tiers of time pile into, shatter through other tiers or angle up oddly, brightly lined with granite or talus, a jumble, metaphysical debris: but the stream finding its way down a new hill spills along the right ledges, shifts the schist chips about and down with becoming coherence, and moss beds down ruffling shale edges dark gray to green, and the otter drinks from sidepools almost perfectly clear. Not smart to be out under trees with the wind still this high: billowing & breaking bring down stob ends of last years drought-wood that died way up in the branches, and a nick on the noggin could drop you, no one around to see after you or call rescue, or you could just be dazzled and wander off down the road, wild: still, dont you like picking up storm cast, swatches of leaves snapped off, bark rippings, to weight the winds reach each thing gave to, how high it held or hung, what angle brought it down: one things certain, falls shadow the wind, ellipses, sprung, noding downwind to the arc including everything. The ice-bound spruce boughs point downward as if to slide their sheathes off: the fairest morning in weeks, crystalline, yields to the fire rising in the east: even the smallest presences take on orientation lit and shaded snow, twinkling millions in starred ground frost, dust-snow highlighting twigs lighting birds flurry free to light on. Their faces fire-red and steaming, the hunters are out the first morning along the edges and crossings of backroads: guns unlocked hang broken over their arms: they blow the fist not caught in the jacket pocket: back home, the wife is out of the kitchen and off to work, work now mostly deskwork, womens work: the men pad their right shoulders, eager for the answering recoil of the spent thrust: the bark on the snow-paled trees seems pure male: the brush thicket, the mazes of stripped vines, the sunk water under pooled leaves, the slash-back branches are male, the bucks springing, startled still, dropping: back at the office, in the shop, the women are fiddling with papers: out here, the parameters burst, the deep roots of the caverns spill through. The mind derives from the manifold concretions and motions of nature motions of its own reaching up into the curvatures of unity but is not content to vanish, extinguished, into the resolutions of nothingness, but precisely as the worlds world fades behind projects structures of design, placements, so that capabilitys entanglements can filigree the very freedom of nothingness, the minds world shining direction from the void of unity toward the enchantments of what needs to be. What the power is and what we can do to save ourselves with or from it, how are we to know, receiving it sieved, in hints and doubleblips, echoes from dubious bluffs, silent declarations, birds and leaves in motion, announcements from bodies and points of light: flood or puddle, whatever it is, it stands in the Way: we here and there ride, wade, drown.

Theres a rift of days sunny (not too windy, not too cold) between leaf- and snowfall when raking works: away on a weekend, you could miss it and rain could sog everything slick-flat or gusts could leave no leaf not lifting off the ground: stick around the house, a big sheet ready, a strong-caned rake strung tight, and catch the sun just when it stills the air dry: thats likely to be before some cold front frost-furring the saw-edged leaves glistened brittle, clouds tightening the horizon: then the white leaves fly. This enterprise answers to none of the natural balances, trade-offs, exactions: it doesnt shape to debit and credit differences: people are losing propositions: what they build flakes away, even when they dont take it with them: no economy of justice, no sparing, no payment for services rendered rolls this circus by: you make your mind up first to do it, rain or shine, giving or taking: you decide to decide to love: then, here and there, bit by burn, a nod, a touch, smile, the sweet love starts showing up. Thunder grumbles, drops, thuds, breaking down away (gravel-road rubble) the heads hidden up in summer haze and none of the lightnings veins shows: it could be mountains lost as much as clouds up there, and the sound could be of equivalences coming down, avalanches of stone, mud, snow, not just a front and all-day soak making up but so what, anything can be with a little ink or wine produced: take the truth that in a drizzle drops tickle leaves so its a pause whether its a breeze: who cares about a truth like that: nearly all, maybe all, most truth doesnt matter a tittle of rubble or rain: what matters is that sometimes the spirit halts and listens for what outleaps the insides of summits thunders rumble has never jarred: what is to be seen within brightens the eye brighter than any lightning. To the eye the far ridges high slopes are mist, boulders soaked through, blue floating thin to white, not what the mind asserts, hard rock skimmed over with brush the lowering look-alike clouds have to give to: the mind from the invitations, deceptions contrives a regularum intervening, the moon, sun-size, corrected slight: last week I was there and the brush was trees and the terrain tense roots rockgrain refused till cracked and felt into. To the intricacy of the webbing, oh, good, here come the broad, coarse, blunt, how honorable they are, they walk with plunging casualness, tearing without knowing through the spun fur of subtlety, and cyclists put rubber on the road, turn around and put down more, see who can put down most, and the farmer plants fire wild in the fall fields shifty wind and breathes the smoke with an assurance of wine bouquet and another farmer mounts the combine and eats soybean dust for hours (the phlegm, he says, digests it and brings it up again) and good lord what room the round swearer gives the language, he surrounds the possibilities of elegance, pours bad beer into the roundness the words fly out from: Im tired of honed lines and high wires and bickering niceties of balance: disc up an acre by mistake (it was already seeded) split the rip saw through two or three grand poplars (tulip leaf and tulip cone) and let us kick around unsure and free, legislation so much milkweed silk. Well, the white asters are wide open (theres even a chicory blossom or two left on a big weed) but its too cold for the bees to come: every now and then a snowflake streaks out of the hanging gray, winters first whitening: white on white let it be, then, flake to petal to hold for a minute or so: meanwhile, golden bees are milling at the door, to pour out should that other gold, the sun, break in.