Ammons - Selected Longer Poems

By the same author 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 1973-1974 Bollingen Prize in Poetry) Diversifications The Snow Poems Highgate Road The Selected Poems: 1951-1977 A. R. AMMONS Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. Copyright 1980, 1975, 1972 by A. R.

Ammons Published simultaneously in Canada by George J. McLeod Limited, Toronto. All Rights Reserved First Edition The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Ammons, A R 1926 Selected longer poems. I. Title. PS3501.M6A61980811.547917593 ISBN 0393012972 ISBN 0393009629 pbk.

ISBN 978-1-324-00368-7 (ebook) with all my love to my son John Acknowledgments A list of all my longer poems, arranged chronologically, would read as follows: Tape for the Turn of the Year (published separately) Pray Without Ceasing Summer Session Essay on Poetics Extremes and Moderations Hibernaculum Sphere, the Form of a Motion (published separately) Summer Place (The Hudson Review, Summer 1977) The Snow Poems (published separately). I am grateful to Jerald Bullis who suggested that a book such as this should be made available to go with The Selected Poems 1951-1977 which contains shorter poems.

I hear the low falling from the highlands of hog-pasture, a music of spheres, a couple: whatever is done is to be undone: call me down from the high places: I have achieved much of the difficulty of my translation: stock in trade gunstock stockings stocks & bonds & good stock put no stock in that a stock case in stock stock the soup 3, the mystical figure, comes through: the alternating, suspended, opposing spheres undirected and the directed unity, reconciler and putter to sleep milt on the levees of rationality: O Aegypte, Aegypte, of thy religious rites nought will survive but tales which thy childrens children will not believe; nought will survive but words graven upon stones that tell of thy piety. (Trismegistus) and in sleep, as in a natural sleep, prone, face turned as if into breath, he had about him needments, bottles of rare glass, bowls: we wrapped him in reed mat, rose from decomposing, generating waters, went up on the plateau and put him in sand: hereafter has not changed since for him: but his heads magnificence and funny-stuff, those epicycles of motion, rituals of turning, dancing, the wind has taken, nothing changed into grass: all the way out of the rise and fall: O Egypt I sometimes hear the future of the universe speaking in a moonwheels turning of sand and light: we set out a withe of silver grass and it remains: it has interfered with the natural wind, fractured the paralleleity of moonbeams and disturbed lesser sandstorms: mimicry so often far more succeeds: you heal back from napalm: the flame-scars pull chin to chest, the fingers stick: the mercy of sands scarless: when the sand roars, a lion rouses in the center, his eyes, as if in a hollow, headless: recognition is the fiercest imperative: a pararox, couple achers: the real estate of the imagination: whatever is terror, pity, grief, death, risinga child sits in explosions clutter, homeless, his small driftwood legs, his eyes inventing an equal rage & dark, white smears of burn the mask his face must fit: whatever is, brutality, the inner siege, the mind orange, blue with desolations mold, something thin & high cuts through whatever is and makes no difference of difference: my mouth, become eyes, weeps words: words spill into hyacinths: for my acquaintance with grief is intimate, lost voices my credentials: singings been sung: the same body is crying: fatigues snagged by wire, bodies sag in their buttons, collars flutter, surf jogs, the wind all outside and usual: blue dusk fills up under the gold smoke: the sky violates nothing to intercede: I held her by the rose and intruded: the petals slickened, silken: I shaved my head & offered it there: O rose the microflora along your hinder walls are fast bloomers: tunnel-scapes beady with stiff moss: who keeps the saltsea keeps its plankton, not reasonable? microflora, reproducing, dont mind the long glider that coming shoulders out the wind to fundamental suction: collapsible I live with spherical walls: everyway I look leaning in, leaning ins the style & passing over: I pick pockets of perse pansies, poesies, posepays, powder palls & wary: I had a little pony: his name was Dapple Gray: and every time I had him, he tried to get away: who will eat from such a garden let him have an oedipal situation and my rights and privileges: that the triadic Hegel could have been evidencing his genitals is a notion of such cracking solemnity birds fail to fly: some are spring harvests: today, April Fools, a squirrel in the leafless elm gathered torn bark and inner tissue from dead branches, wadding them into her mouth then going limb by thinning limb to leap onto the heavy electric wire, then going upstreet to my neighbors streetside spruce: I think thats where the nest will be: waste assimilated into use: the result a neatness unpremeditated, a re-ingestion of process: so arranged it is that my wasted life becomes words that through complexity and unstructured swirl seek the fall-out of comparable enhancements: occurrences recognitions surroundings tensions sprung free into event happenstance & necessity prediction & surprise moment & forever and the gloomy, oh the melancholy, remorseful falling back and away of time-sunk persons and places, ragged knots of a grounded, celestial kite: yesterday robins on the dark edge of dusk sang like peepers: I went out to listen and they were robins: and on the cold edge of spring though on a warm day we went out into the woods for hepaticas up along Six Mile Creek: we found one spring-beauty and by sun-warmed logs a few clusters of hepatica, hundreds of plants but few bloomers: the backfall of creekwater was interesting, countercaps, and compensating, the up-creek water along eddying banks: peripheries: the dance about the fire, utterance of tongues, parlance of feet: griefs cant be removed, only altered, caught up into the timed motions of bearable sway: fall in love with yourself where its shallow: dont thwart shriveling up by suddenly drowning: if change is certain, as say so many, certainty is where there isnt any: pop gun soda pop pop art popsicle mom & pop popinjay pop in popeyed population I cant get that star carted I said: flooded carburetor, cracked voltage regulator: I didnt realize at once it was apt: a Starchief: and one day a man said looking at the dash word, it has your name in it:Starchief:he was a good abstractor: I had a little pony: his name was Dapple Gray: and when I tried to trim him, he had a lot to bray: an inch of snow last night but mid morning is bright and melting: the shadows are white: napalm isnt falling here: so what is it: first, an explosion near the ground: then a tarry rain, soft and afire, falls, crumbles, & sticks: sticks to trees, houses, children, things like that: if it hits its 94.3% effective: I see my death, my horror, the radical, real, senseless pain, as a coming afloat, rocking in a mastery of oceans: what time caricatures should time keep: to those busy making themselves great, with grave music and solemn looks, a thorough using up and setting forth of languages materials, I send empty statements, slip-shoddiness, incredible breeziness and such: the wind we go to understands everything: I sing, though, in a way, the best I can, for I may be understood where I do not understand: around the aureola matters get touchy: confusion erodes the ice-glass steel offices buildings of rationality: anti-rationality only makes another kind of thrust: complexity blurs the sleek towers, wilts the phallus of mistaken direction: welcome to your unattended, coin-operated, do-it-yourself laundry: bring and use your favorite bleach, soap, and starch: if machine is defective, please use another machine: to start washer put money in coin meter and (1) if slide type meterslowly push slide all the way in: then slowly pull slide all the way out: (2) if rotary knob type meter turn knob: tub will start filling not later than minute after operating coin slide: stopcock cock & bull ears cocked cocktail peacock cockle cockney cockiness cockscomb poppycock cockeyed cockroach cockpit cocksure dryclean wash n wears, even cotton items: use this handy clothing guide: follow these simple steps: brush away loose lint and other soiling matter: turn sweaters inside out: turn down cuffs of trousers: insert the necessary coins: rubbers, after several drycleanings, tend to lose elasticity: plastic-coated fabrics often become stiff. beware sequins, beads, and other fragile ornaments, can get you into trouble: remove wear wrinkles and sharpen creases and pleats: some spots refuse to come out, rust, mildew, dried paint, indelible ink: little artery, couple inches long, branching into cardiac muscle: it pops and you give up philosophy and ultimate concern, car payments, son and wife, you give up the majors & minors, the way you like your egg cooked, your class ring, lawn, sparrows nesting in the garage, the four crocus bulbs (maybe more next year), toenails and fillings: I wouldnt want to happen up on any critters of eternity, absolutes that end the world: fellow said one star up there in our galaxy is mostly gadolinium, a rare earth; nobody knows how the concentration occurred: then there are other surpluses and scarcities that uneven the tissue: I wouldnt want anything to get known tight: ignorance is our boat giving us motion: or, capsized, knowledge is our ark which is more in line with the tradition: the ocean would then be what it is: spirit, though it encompasseth mightiness, etc., however, cannot, like a motor, raise and lower toast: nothing matters, believe me, except everything: to sift & sort, magnify & diminish, admit & renounce, impairs the event: what the mind cant accepts obscene: the rest shines with an additional, redeeming light, the light in the head of language in motion: the wave coming in, running, gathers, lofts, curlsthe instant of motions maximum organization: then: then one is forty & hollow: the curls reach redeems the hollow, equals it, till the curl touches over: what is the use: the crashing, the hollow coming topside into wide prevalence, the flat waters skinnying out and rushing backis merely endurance until the next wave lifts: as for whats left, dip it and ship it: to have made it here is not to have it made: entering is lovely: such delicacies, scents, the feminine source, perfumes: cookies in the oven, delights: mixmaster, mixmaster, mast me a mix, ur, mix me a mist, ur...