Ten Poems
Ten Poems A.R. Ammons
Contents
Silver........4
Prospecting.....5
Jersey Cedars....6
Bourn.........7
Canto 1:........8
Canto 7:.........9
Canto 8:.........11
Canto 10:........14
Canto 12:.......15
Canto 17:.......16
Silver
I thought Silver must have snaked logs when young
She couldn't stand to have the line brush her lower hind leg
In blinded halter she couldn't tell what had loosened behind her and was coming downhill to rush into her crippling her to the ground
And when she almost went to sleep, me dreaming at the slow plow, I would at dream's end turning over the mind to a new chapter let the line drop and touch her leg and she would bring the plow out of the ground with speed but wisely fall soon again into the slow requirements of our dreams
How we turned at the ends of rows without sense to new furrows and went back flicked by cornblades and hearing the circling in the cornblades of horseflies in pursuit
I hitch up early, the raw spot on silver's shoulder sore to the collar, get a wrench and change the plow's bull-tongue for a sweep, and go out, wrench in my hip pocket for later adjustments, down the ditch-path by the white-bloomed briars, wet crabgrass, cattails, and rusting ferns, riding the plow handles down, keeping the sweep's point from the ground, the smooth bar under the plow gliding, the traces loose, the raw spot wearing its soreness out in the gentle movement to the fields
When the snake-bitten in the spring pasture grass Silver came up to the gate and stood head-down enchanted in her fate
I found her sorrowful eyes by accident and knew
Nevertheless the doctor could not keep her from all the consequences, rolls in the sand, the blank extension of limbs, head thrown back in the dust, unless unfocusing eyes, belly swollen wide as I was tall and I went out in the night and saw her in the solitude of her wilderness
But she lived and one day half got up and looking round at the sober world took me back into her eyes and then got up and walked and plowed again, mornings her swollen snake-bitten leg wept bright as dew and dried to streaks of salt leaked white from the hair
Prospecting
Coming to cottonwoods, an
Orange rockshelf,
And in the gully
An edging of stream willows,
I made camp
And turned my mule loose
To graze in the dark
evening of the mountain
Drowzed over the coals
And my loneliness
Like an inner image went
Out and shook
Hands with the willows,
And running up the black scarp
Tugging the heavy moon
Up and over into light,
And on a hill-thorn of sage
Called the coyotes
And told ghost stories to
A night-circle of lizards.
Tipping on its hands the Dipper unobtrusively
poured out the night
At dawn returning, wet
To the hips with meetings, my loneliness woke me up
And we merged refreshed into
The breaking of camp and day
Jersey Cedars
The wind inclines the cedars and lets snow riding in the bow them
Swaying weepers
On the hedgerows of open fields
Black-green branches stubby fans under snow
Bent spires dipping at the ground
Oh said the cedars will spring let us rise
And I said rain
Will thawing
Unburder you
And will
They said
We stand again green-cone arrows at the sun
The forces I said are already set up
But they splintering in that deep soft day
Could not herd
Their moans
Into my quiet speech
And I bent
Over arms
Dangling loose to wind and snow to be
With them assailing the earth with moans
Bourn
When I got past relevance
The singing shores
Told me to turn back
But I took the outward gray
To be
Some meaning of foreign light
Trying to get through and
When I looked back I saw the shores were dancing
Willows of it was not far to look back on waves
So I came to the decimal of being entered and was gone
What light there no tongue turns to tell
Though willows weep and shores sing always
Canto 1:
You cannot come to unity and remain material:
In that perception is no perceiver:
When you arrive
You have gone too far:
At the Source you are in the mouth of Death:
You cannot
Turn around in
The Absolute: there are no entrances or exits
No precipitations of forms
To use like tongs against the formless;
No freedom to choose:
To be
You have to stop not-being and break
Off from is to flowing and
This is the sin you weep and praise:
Origin is your original sin:
The return you long for will ease your guilt and you will have your longing:
The wind that is my guide said this it
Should know having
Given up everything to eternal being but
direction:
How I said can I be glad and sad: but a man goes from one foot to the other;
Wisdom wisdom:
To be glad and sad at once is also unity
And death:
Wisdom wisdom: a peachblossom blooms on a particular
Tree on a particular day:
Unity cannot do anything in particular:
Are these the thoughts you want me to think I said but
the wind was gone and there was no more knowledge then
Canto 7:
here are some pretty things I picked for you:
1) Dry thunder
Rustling like water
down the sky's caves
2) The fieldwild
Yellow daisy
Focusing dawn
Inaugurates
The cosmos
3) The universe comes
To bear
On a willow-slip; and
You cannot unwind
A pebble
From its constellations
4) Chill frog-gribber
From grass
Or loose stone
Is
Crucial as fieldwild
Yellow daisy:
Such proposition!
Each thing boundless in its effect,
Eternal in the working our
Of its effect: each brush
Of beetle-bristle against a twig
And the whole
Shifts, compensates, realigns:
The crawl of a slug
On the sea's floor
Quivers the moon to a new dimension;
Bright philosophy,
Shake us all here on the
Bottom of an ocean of space
We babble words recorded
In waves
Of sound that
Cannot fully disappear
Washing up
Like fossils on the shores
Of unknown worlds:
Nevertheless, taking our identities,
We accept destruction:
A tree, committed as a tree,
Cannot in a flood
Turn a fish,
Sprout gills (leaves are
A tree's gills) and fins:
The molluscs
Dug out of mountain peaks
Are all dead
Oh I will be addled and easy and move
Over this prairie in the wind's keep,
Long-lying sierras blue-low in the distance:
I will glide and say little
(What would you have me say? I know nothing:
Still, I cannot help singing)
And after much grace
I will pause
And break cactus water for your lips;
Identity's strict confinement! A risk
And possibility,
Granted by mercy
in your death is the mercy of your granted life:
do not quibble:
dry thunder in the locus weed!
The supple willow-slip leafless in the winter!
The chill gribber of the frog
Still in the nightsnake's foraging thrust!
Grim:
Enchanting:
Repeating mid might these songs for these divisions
Canto 8:
Every evening, down into the hardweed
Going,
The slop bucket, heavy, held out, wire handle
Freezing in the hand, put it down a minute, the jerky
Smooth, unspilling levelness of the knees,
Meditation of a bucket rim,
Lest the what meal,
Floating on clear grease-water, spill
Down the grown-up path:
Don't forget to slop the hogs,
Feed the chickens,
Water the mule,
Cut the kindling,
Build the fire,
Call up the cow:
Supper is over, it's starting to get
Dark early,
Better get the scraps together, mix a little meal in, nothing but swill.
The dead-purple woods hover on the west. I know those woods. Under the tall, ceiling-solid pines, beyond the edge of field and brush, where the wild myrtle grows, I let my jo-reet loose. A jo-reet is a bird. Nine weeks of summer he sat on the well-bench in a screened box, a stick inside to walk on, "Jo-reet," he said, "jo-reet."
And I would come up to the well and draw the bucker down deep into the cold place where red and white marbled clay oozed the purest water, water celebrated throughout the country.
Throw a dipper of cold water on him. Reddish-black flutter.
"Reet, reet, reet!"
Better turn him loose before cold weather comes on.
Doom caving in
Inside
Any pleasure, pure
Attachment
Of love.
Beyond the wild myrtle away from cats I turned him loose and his eyes asked me what to do, where to go; he hopped around, scratched a little, but looked at me. Don't look at me. Winter is coming. Disappear in the bushes. I'm tired of you and will be alone hereafter. I will go dry in my well.
I will turn still. Go south. Grits is not available in any natural form. Look under leaves, try mushy logs, the floors of pinywoods. South into the dominion of bugs.
They're good woods. But lay me out if a mourning dove far off in the dusky pines starts.
Down the hardweed path going, leaning, balancing, away from the bucket, to Sparkle, my favorite hog, sparse, fine black hair, grunted while feeding, if rubbed, scratched against the hair, or if talked to gently: got the bottom of the slop bucket:
"Sparkle."
"grunt, grunt."
"You hungry?"
"grunt, grunt."
"hungry, girly?"
"grunt, grunt, grunt"
Blowing, bubbling in the trough.
"think it's going to freeze tonight?" say the neighbors, the neighbors, going by
Hog-killing
Oh, Sparkle, when the axe tomorrow morning falls and the rush is made to open your throat, I will sing, watching dry-eyed as a man, sing my love for you in the tender feedings.
She's nothing but a hog, boy.
Bleed out, Sparkle, the moon-chilled bleaches of your body hanging upside-down hardening through the mind and night of the first freeze.
Canto 10
The soul is a region without definite boundaries: it is not certain a prairie can exhaust it
Or a range enclose it: it floats (self-adjusting) like the continental mass
Where it towers most extending its deepest mantling base (exactly proportional):
Does not flow all the way: there is a divide:
River systems thrown like winter tree-shadows against the hills: branches, runs, high lakes: stagnant lily-marshes:
Is variable, has weather: floods unbalancing gut, it silt altering the distribution of weight, the nature of content: whirlwinds move through it or stand spinning like separate orders: the moon comes: by self-attrition from themselves, a growth into destruction of growth, change of character. Invasion of peat by poplar and oak: semi-precious stones and precious metals drop from muddy water into mud: it is an area of poise, really, held from tipping, dark wild water, fierce cels, countercurrents: a habitat, precise ecology, of forms mutually to some extent tolerable, not entirely self-destroying: a crust float Mutually to countercurrents: a habitat, precise ecology , of forms mutually to some extent tolerable not entirely self destroying: a crust afloat: a scum, foam to the deep and other natured: but deeper than depth, too: a vacancy and swirl: it may be spherical; light and knowledge merely the iris and opening to the dark methods of its sight: how it comes and goes, ruptures and heals whirls and stands still: the moon come: terrain:
Canto12:
A tea-garden shows you how:
You sit in rhododendron shade at table on a pavilion-like lawn the sun midafternoon through the blooms and you watch loves and single pavilion-like lawn the sun midafternoon through the blooms and you watch lovers and single people go over the steep moon bridge at the pond's narrows where flies nip circles in the glass and vanish in the widening sight except for an uncertain gauze memory of wings
And you sip from the small thick cup help bird-warm in the hands you watch the people rising on the bridge descend into the pond, where bridge and mirrorbridge merge at the bank returning their images to themselves: a grove of pepper trees (sgraffito) screens them into isolation of love or loneliness: it is enough from this to think in the green tea scent and turn to further things: when the spirit comes to the bridge of consciousness and climbs higher and higher toward the peak no one reaches live but where ascension and descension meet
Completing the idea of a bridge think where the body is, that going too deep it may lose touch, wander a ghost in hell sing irretrievably in gloom, and think how the spirit silvery with vision may break loose in high wind and go off weightless body never to rise or spirit to fall again to unity, to lovers strolling through pepper tree shad: paradise was when Dante regathered from height and depth came out onto the soft, green, level earth into the natural light, come, sweat, bloodblessings, and thinning sheaf of days
Canto 17: I shall go down to the deep river, to the moonwaters, where the silver willows are and the bay blossoms, to the songs of dark birds, to the great wooded silence of lowing forever down the dark river silvered at the moon-singing of hidden birds
27March
The forsythia is out, sprawling like yellow amoebae, the long uneven branches - pseudo-podia- angling on the bottom of a pool of spring -clear wind: shall I go down to the deep river, to the moon waters, where the silver willows are and the bay blossoms, to the songs of dark birds, to the great wooded silence following forever down the dark river silvered at the moon-singing of hidden birds:
Image
Reprinted from the Hudson Review, Vol. XIII, No. 3, Autumn, 1960