By A.R. Ammons
– nothing one can pay cash for seems / very valuable:
– 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:
– one good thing about dense competition is that / if one succeeds with it one is buttressed by / crowding competitors;
– 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 a crusty world headed nowhere, doorless:
– garbage has to be the poem of our time because / garbage is spiritual, believable enough / to get our attention,…what else deflects us from the / errors of our illusionary ways,
– as where but brought low, where / but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we / discern the savage afflictions that turn us around: / where but in the arrangements love crawls us / through, not a thing left in our self-display / unhumiliated, do we find the sweet seed of / new routes:
– one must write and / rewrite till one writes it right
– I can’t believe / I’m merely an old person: whose mother is dead, / whose father is gone and many of whose / friends and associates have wended away to the / ground,
– I say to my writing students—prize your flaws, / defects, behold your accidents, engage your / negative criticisms—these are the materials / on your ongoing—from these places you imagine, / find, or make the ways back to all of us,
– scientists plunge into matter looking for the / matter but the matter lessens and, looked too / far into, expands away: it was insubstantial all / along; that is, boulders bestir; they / are “alive” with motion and space: there is a / riddling reality where real hands grasp each / other in the muff but toward both extremes the / reality wears out, wears thin, becomes a reality / “realityless”:
– approaches the fire: he stares into it as into / eternity, the burning edge of beginning and / ending, the catalyst of going and becoming,
– I went up the road / a piece this morning at ten to Pleasant Grove / for the burial of Ted’s ashes: those above / ground care; those below don’t:
– things are sustained by interrelations and / variety but when something goes wrong who / can isolate the active cause, an / active ingredient often riding in a complex of / contextual vectors: and nothing short of a / laboratory experiment in which controlled / circumstances can be evaluated one at a time / is likely to prove limitingly clarifying:
– you keep your mind / open and on the move and eventually there is a / trace of feeling like a bit of mist on a backroad / but then it reappears stronger and more central, / still coming and going, so the mind can’t / grab it and hold on to it: but the mind begins / to make an effort, to shed from itself all / awareness except that of going with the feeling, / to relax and hold the feeling—the feeling / is a brutal burning, a rich, raw urgency:
– all the bets are off if / pain is walking around the table cutting you or / someone else up, or if poverty has worked its way / up into your knees or you can’t get your eyes dry, / or a child is bruised or a woman cornered / or thrills and violence can’t be distinguished: / then existence recalls with relief that existence / ends, that our windy houses crack their frames / and spill, that nothing, not even cold killing bothers / the stars: twinkle, twinkle
– we may be alone in / words but we are not singular in language: / have some respect for other speakers of being and / for god’s sake drop all this crap about words, / singularity, and dominion:
– from the warm movement of a possibility / to a cold acknowledgement
– I’m trying to mean what I / mean to mean something:
– (1) don’t complain—ill are sufficiently / clear without reiterated description: (2) count / your blessings, spelling them over and over into / sharp contemplation: (3) do what you can— / take action: (4) move on, keep the mind / allied with the figurations of ongoing:
– when / I was a kid I always, it seemed, had a point / I couldn’t say or that no one could accept— / I always sounded unconvincing; / I lost the / arguments: people became impatient and stuck / to their own beliefs; my explanations struck / them as strange, unlikely: when I learned / about poetry, I must have recognized a means / to command silence in them, the means so to / combine thinking and feeling, imagination and / movement as to spell them out of speech: / people would buy the enchantment and get the / point reasons couldn’t, the point delivered below / the lever of argument, straight into the fat / of feeling:
– you don’t want to succeed too early and live / in the shadow of your own peek, peak
– times / sometimes darken before dark:
– the / rabbit knows that if he doesn’t like it here he / can’t just go off somewhere else to live: so / he carefully dissolves from panic and nibbles / a spring of weed, ease into a forward move, / and lives in fear: not helplessly, but in the / knowledge of his capabilities, his devices, his / bounces and split swerves
– keep the open stare of the chill factor in warmth: / even in the midst of passion plant the seed / whose vine or tree may hang you: things / not followed as risks are risky: being alive / means being alive to mischance’s chances.
– in your end is my beginning, I repeat: also, / my end; my end is, in fact, your end, in a way: / are we not bound together by our ends: and when, / end to end, our ends meet, then we begin to / see the end of disturbing endlessness: unity / does what unity can: while preserving two / it accords in mutuality a mist wonderfully and / onefully coming together in—ah—well, why / entail sophistry:
– progression lies down in the / ditches of inpouring doubt:
– it’s rough for anyone in a fog,
– I can hardly think / or think of hardly a thing to say:
– just when you think / the spirit is going to rise, something else does: / life, life is like a poem: the moment it / begins, it begins to end: the tension this / establishes makes every move and moment, every / gap and stumble, every glide and rise significant: / for if life or poem went dribbling endlessly / on, what identifiable arc or measure could it / clarify: within limits the made things accepts / its revelation and dissolution, its coming and / going, beginning and ending, being and nonbeing
– life, too, if it is to have / meaning, must be made meaningful: if it is to / have purpose, its purpose must be divined, invented, / manifested, held to:
– everything here may be meaninglessly / prevalent so as to give us the potential of / making’s range: when we bawl over our / predicament we merely accuse ourselves: why / must we answer up to reality, when we can / axle reality into our illusions
– argument is like dining: / mess with a nice dinner long enough, it’s garbage.
– I posit no faith of a kind but faith of another / kind: that is, maybe some spooky agency does / manage all: we’re attracted to stars not because / they’re confessional but because of the roles / they create into play; we’re attracted to / pretend, not fact, first: then, the clothing / of creativity about the person attracts us to / his sins…also we want better / to understand how to reach this creativity’s / sinfulness ourselves: so why can’t poets / speak in tongues, other than their own: is / truth in the fact or in the persuasion, in the / credible action or the flat statement: I don’t care whether anybody believes me or not: I / don’t know anything I want anybody to believe or / in:
– since words were / introduced here things have gone poorly for the / planet:
– the real trouble with a blabbermouth is that when / he talks and keeps talking, pretty soon he’s / talking around, and pretty soon he’s / on the other side!
– nothing is / perfect, unless you can unite two good sides from / different situations:
– I / looked into the pit of death and it was there, / the pit was, and the death: I circled it saying / this looks like safety’s surcease next to which / risks’ splits and roars
– the antecedent of meaning is not / meaning always, meaning which could direct, / delimit, interfere, but the absence of meaning:
– there is truly only meaning, / only meaning, meanings, so many meanings, / meaninglessness becomes what to make of so many / meanings: and, truly, everything is real, so / real,
– this is forever, we are now in it: our / eyes see through the round time of nearly all / of being, our minds reach out and in ten billion / years: we are in so much forever, we pay it no / mind, we’d rather think of today’s shopping or / next week’s day off: but we will not be in / forever forever, that is the dropout:
– I want to get / around to where I can say I’m glad I was here, / even if I must go: I want to believe that the / possibility given me to be here was not a betrayal / or trap or hoax but a trial of the possibility / of a possibility, that I can find firm grounds / for thinking what I want to think as well as / for despair, incoherence, distrust, drifting acedia:
– slap the world any way, / it flaps back: turn the dial past zero, it’s / back to one:
– things are awash in / ideality: ideal meaninglessness, ideal absurdity, / ideal ideals: we want to know the reality of / these perfectly, ideally, as themselves: poems / that give up the ideal of making sense do not / give up the ideal of not making sense: nom de / plumage best feathers a nest egg, ivory doorknob
– what of so much / possibility, all impossibility:
– are we to identify with the fortunate / who see the energy of possibility as its necessary / brush with impossibility: who define meaning / only in the blasted landfalls of no meaning: / who can in safety call evil essential to the / differentiations of good:
– where, I thought, hope of good is gone / evil becomes the deliverer, and more evil, to get / one through to the clearing where presence, now / pain, enters oblivion:
– every balance / overbalances
– realizing that there is no safety / is safety: the other side of anything is worth / nearly as much as the side:
– if you are not gone at a certain / age, your world is: or it is shriveled to a / few people who know what you know:
– so, have / your choice to leave the world or have it leave / you; either way you choose will bring the same / result, nothingness and the vanishment of / what was:
– over and over the world rolls in this / wise, so much so that people stricken with these / knowledges think the aspiration to win to be / remembered, to be let hanging, dibbling in the minds of those continuing: but life is not first / for being remembered but for being lived!
– if you’ve derived from life / a going thing called life, life has a right to / derive life from you:
– things that go around sometimes go / around so far around they come back around: if you / like my form, experience my function:
– some of these short guys are so / wellhung they’d give an inch off their dicks / if they could put it under their heels, and you / could jack down some of these tall guys a foot / if they could move into another inch: and the skinny-hipped woman, double moons up front / while with some these big rears, they don’t / have enough to stick your lips to: these wayward / compensations reaching squandering extremes
– beauty is so much in demand it’s a wonder natural / selection hasn’t thinned out anything not perfectly / beautiful: but nature, if I may speak for it, / likes a broad spectrum approaching disorder so / as to maintain the potential of change with / variety and environment: the true shape of / perfect beauty, hard to find, somehow floats / implicit and stable there among the shorties, / flopsies, big-legged, limpy, skew-faced, etc.
– the inner study / of outer music: a holiness, the same music / flowing through all of them, the all observing / the sway: I’m a goofball all right, one of / the hurt, one of the criers, one of the shaken / lovers: if love were likely it would not be love:
– is there a world / with no bitter aftertaste or post coital triste:
– don’t worry / be happy: hold / that thought, it is life’s best protection against / thought: when you can’t put something out of the world, put it out of your mind: but don’t / just put something out of your mind—that leaves / a hole: put something you want to think about / in the hole and what that doesn’t fill it will / displace:
– because money is such an easy / (if you have it) access to power; it negotiates / instantly into desire and as it spends its way / into satisfaction it is desire itself desiring / itself:
– people above accusation’s harm should have / something to be accused of:
– the right / time to write is when you have nothing to say, / your purview unrifted by the prejudice of personal / flows or ores,
– beware the interests of the interested; theirs / might not include yours:
– when you come to something not worth saying, / you might as well say so and say it:
– poetry is not logic or / knowledge or philosophy; it is action and / action’s pleasure, but where does action end / and pleasure end, short of logic altogether.
– you can’t classify except by / breaking down: some people say somethings are / sacred and others secular and some say everything / is sacred or everything is secular: but if / everything is sacred (or secular), then what is / that:
– so / it is all probably not a matter of the sacred / and secular, the good and bad, virtuous and / evil but a matter of measure; that is, it is / the fullness thereof; and all things that exist / are full of the fullness thereof and cannot, / without loss, be tapped, drained, squooshed, or / stuck on fine little pins: to be on the lookout / for evil (swamp rattlers) is a form of paying / attention, and to pay attention is to behold the / wonder, and the rights, of things, so just as / the fear of losing something (or someone) increases / its value enormously, so wariness of vipers and / other maelstroms of panic give us the brilliant / morning, the sun brittle on the hill-line before / it pops an arc-glob:
– holy, you know, even / plowing a good way into garbage, taking that on / as having, perhaps, just served a sacred function / or, having passed through the cleansing of decay, / ju(s)t about to: for, you know, forms are never / permanent form, change the permanence, so / that one things one day is something else another / day, and the energy that informs all forms just / breezes right through filth as clean as a whistle: / all this stuff here is illusory, you know, and / while it gives you bad dreams and wilding desires
– sometimes, taking a little / interest in something displaces the anxiety, / refocuses the attention, puts the mind off / itself: on a shelf is a good place to put the mind:
– anxiety often itself has such heights of stalled / cumuli it can perform miracles, it can in seeking / ease deal with more substance than a clanking bore / can: