Ammons - Bosh and flapdoodle: poems

A. R. Ammons Bosh and Flapdoodle Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. 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 Ammonss 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.

This morning, with small swirls of the seasons 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 its just like losing yr dog, she doesnt 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 didnt 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, wouldnt want an infant swinging from their belly or arms or riding on their backs if it wasnt 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 example of firmness in hand: it is, then, without doubt the sharpness of male need that perpetuates the species (which, truly, might better be left alone): RULLY OUSTSTANDING Nature, you know, is not a one-way street: its most consistent figure is turningturning 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 timethat is, if time is a one-way street: that is, if time, too, doesnt 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, doesnt mind desolation: Venuss boiling stones are just a lit merriment: the hillside, drenched by rain after wild fires, doesnt 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 havent 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: dont worry about nature: it is always nature: when we divert water into Californias 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. They say, lose weight, change your lifestyle: thats, 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 youre trapped between resistance and getting your moneys 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 lifewho wants to pick the subrealities from his teeth every minutebut all this is just not what we were designed for, bad as it was: any way I go now I feel Im 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, Im 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 ones 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 dont 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....