Gravelly Run -- 10 Poems of A. R. Ammons

Gravelly Run

By A. R. Ammons


I don't know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
of stones and trees,
of bending, sand pit lakes, crescent

round groves of dwarf pine;
for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it:
the swamp's slow water comes
down Gravelly Run fanning the long,
stone-held algal
hair and narrowing roils between

the shoulders of the highway bridge:
holly grows on the banks in the woods there,
and the cedar's gothic-clustered
spires could make
green religion in winter bones: so I

look and reflect, but the air's glass
jail seals each thing in its entity: no
use to make any philosphies here:
I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from

the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road

---

Still

By A. R. Ammons

I said I will find what is lowly

and put the roots of my identity

down there:

each day I'll wake up

and find the lowly nearby,

a handy focus and reminder,

a ready measure of my significance,

the voice by which I would be heard,

the wills, the kinds of selfishness

I could

freely adopt as my own:



but though I have looked everywhere,

I can find nothing

to give myself to:

everything is



magnificent with existence, is in

surfeit of glory:

nothing is diminished,

nothing has been diminished for me:



I said what is more lowly than the grass:

ah, underneath,

a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:

I looked at it closely

and said this can be my habitat: but

nestling in I

found

below the brown exterior

green mechanisms beyond the intellect

awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up



and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:

I found a beggar:

he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying

him any attention: everybody went on by:

I nestled in and found his life:

there, love shook his body like a devastation:

I said

though I have looked everywhere

I can find nothing lowly

in the universe:



I whirled though transfigurations up and down,

transfigurations of size and shape and place:



at one sudden point came still,

stood in wonder:

moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent

with being!

---

Close-Up

By A. R. Ammons


Are all these stones
yours
I said
and the mountain
pleased

but reluctant to
admit my praise could move it much

shook a little
and rained a windrow ring of stones
to show
that it was so

Stonefelled I got
up addled with dust

and shook
myself
without much consequence

Obviously I said it doesn't pay
to get too
close up to
greatness

and the mountain friendless wept
and said
it couldn't help
itself

---

Play

By A. R. Ammons


Nothing's going to become of anyone
except death:
therefore: it's okay
to yearn
too high:
the grave accommodates
swell rambunctiousness &

ruin's not
compromised by magnificence:

the cut-off point
liberates us to the
common disaster: so
pick a perch --
apple bough for example in bloom --
tune up
and if you like

drill imagination right through necessity:
it's all right:
it's been taken care of:

is allowed, considering

---

Strolls

By A. R. Ammons


The brook gives me
sparkles plenty, an
abundance, but asks
nothing of me:
snow thickets
and scrawny
snowwork of hedgerows,
still gold weeds, and
snow-bent cedar gatherings
provide
feasts of disposition
(figure, color, weight, proportion)
and require
nothing of me,
not even that I notice: the near-winter
quartermoon
sliding high almost
into color at four-thirty --
the abundance of clarity
along the rose ridge line!
alone, I'm not alone:
a standoffishness and reasonableness
in things finds
me or I find that
in them: sand, fall,
furrow, bluff --
things one, speaking things
not words, would
have found to say

----

Called into Play

By A. R. Ammons

Fall fell: so that's it for the leaf poetry:

some flurries have whitened the edges of roads



and lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: &

turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going to



find something to write about I haven't already

written away: I will have to stop short, look



down, look up, look close, think, think, think:

but in what range should I think: should I



figure colors and outlines, given forms, say

mailboxes, or should I try to plumb what is



behind what and what behind that, deep down

where the surface has lost its semblance: or



should I think personally, such as, this week

seems to have been crafted in hell: what: is



something going on: something besides this

diddledeediddle everyday matter-of-fact: I



could draw up an ancient memory which would

wipe this whole presence away: or I could fill



out my dreams with high syntheses turned into

concrete visionary forms: Lucre could lust



for Luster: bad angels could roar out of perdition

and kill the AIDS vaccine not quite



perfected yet: the gods could get down on

each other; the big gods could fly in from



nebulae unknown: but I'm only me: I have 4

interests--money, poetry, sex, death: I guess



I can jostle those. . . .

---

The City Limits

By A. R. Ammons

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold

itself but pours its abundance without selection into every

nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider



that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but

lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider

the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest



swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,

not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider

the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue



bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped

guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no

way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider



that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,

each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then

the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the



leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark

work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes

and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

---

An Improvisation for Angular Momentum

By A. R. Ammons


Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out,
motions profound,
alive, musical!

Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother
does not desert us but comes to tend
and produce us, to make room for us
and bear us tenderly, considerately,
through the gates, to see us through,
to ease our pains, quell our cries,
to hover over and nestle us, to deliver
us into the greatest, most enduring
peace, all the way past the bother of
recollection,
beyond the finework of frailty,
the mishmash house of the coming & going,
creation's fringes,
the eddies and curlicues

---

 He Held Radical Light

By A. R. Ammons





He held radical light

as music in his skull: music

turned, as

over ridges immanences of evening light

rise, turned

back over the furrows of his brain

into the dark, shuddered,

shot out again

in long swaying swirls of sound:



reality had little weight in his transcendence

so he

had trouble keeping

his feet on the ground, was

terrified by that

and liked himself, and others, mostly

under roofs:

nevertheless, when the

light churned and changed



his head to music, nothing could keep him

off the moutains, his

head back, mouth working,

wrestling to say, to cut loose

from the high unimaginable hook:

released, hidden from stars, he ate,

burped, said he was like any one

of us: demanded he

was like any one of us.

---

Easter Morning

By A. R. Ammons

I have a life that did not become,

that turned aside and stopped,

astonished:

I hold it in me like a pregnancy or

as on my lap a child

not to grow old but dwell on



it is to his grave I most

frequently return and return

to ask what is wrong, what was

wrong, to see it all by

the light of a different necessity

but the grave will not heal

and the child,

stirring, must share my grave

with me, an old man having

gotten by on what was left



when I go back to my home country in these

fresh far-away days, it�s convenient to visit

everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,

look how he�s shooting up, and the

trinket aunts who always had a little

something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark

or a penny or nickel, and uncles who

were the rumored fathers of cousins

who whispered of them as of great, if

troubled, presences, and school



teachers, just about everybody older

(and some younger) collected in one place

waiting, particularly, but not for

me, mother and father there, too, and others

close, close as burrowing

under skin, all in the graveyard

assembled, done for, the world they

used to wield, have trouble and joy

in, gone



the child in me that could not become

was not ready for others to go,

to go on into change, blessings and

horrors, but stands there by the road

where the mishap occurred, crying out for

help, come and fix this or we

can�t get by, but the great ones who

were to return, they could not or did

not hear and went on in a flurry and

now, I say in the graveyard, here

lies the flurry, now it can�t come

back with help or helpful asides, now

we all buy the bitter

incompletions, pick up the knots of

horror, silently raving, and go on

crashing into empty ends not

completions, not rondures the fullness

has come into and spent itself from



I stand on the stump

of a child, whether myself

or my little brother who died, and

yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for

for me it is the dearest and the worst,

it is life nearest to life which is

life lost: it is my place where

I must stand and fail,

calling attention with tears

to the branches not lofting

boughs into space, to the barren

air that holds the world that was my world



though the incompletions

(& completions) burn out

standing in the flash high-burn

momentary structure of ash, still it

is a picture-book, letter-perfect

Easter morning: I have been for a

walk: the wind is tranquil: the brook

works without flashing in an abundant

tranquility: the birds are lively with

voice: I saw something I had

never seen before: two great birds,

maybe eagles, blackwinged, whitenecked

and �headed, came from the south oaring

the great wings steadily; they went

directly over me, high up, and kept on

due north: but then one bird,

the one behind, veered a little to the

left and the other bird kept on seeming

not to notice for a minute: the first

began to circle as if looking for

something, coasting, resting its wings

on the down side of some of the circles:

the other bird came back and they both

circled, looking perhaps for a draft;

they turned a few more times, possibly

rising�at least, clearly resting�

then flew on falling into distance till

they broke across the local bush and

trees: it was a sight of bountiful

majesty and integrity: the having

patterns and routes, breaking

from them to explore other patterns or

better ways to routes, and then the

return: a dance sacred as the sap in

the trees, permanent in its descriptions

as the ripples round the brook�s

ripplestone: fresh as this particular

flood of burn breaking across us now

from the sun.

---

Author's Bio:

A. R. Ammons (1926 - 2001)

Archie Randolph Ammons was born on February 18, 1926, on his family’s small farm near Whiteville and later moved to Chadburn. It was a hardscrabble life and growing up in the country during the Great Depression gave him, as one critic observed, "not only an intimate acquaintance with nature but also a keen sense of the precarious nature of existence." His early years on a tobacco and cotton farm provided the pastoral setting for some of his most memorable work, as well as the inspiration for poems about mules, hog-killings, hunting, and farmlands.

Ammons started writing poetry during the long hours aboard a Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After World War II, he attended Wake Forest University, where his interest in science would influence the unique diction of his poetical style. After a few months of graduate school, he became principal of Hatteras Elementary School and absorbed the sights and sounds of the Outer Banks for a year. He also worked jobs as a real estate salesman, an editor, and an executive in a glass manufacturing firm before he began teaching at Cornell University in 1964.

Ammons has been described as a major American poet in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Generally opting for free forms, he has been concerned with man’s relationship to nature, the problems of identity, permanence and change, and the processes of nature. His whimsically formatted Tape for the Turn of the Year was originally written on a roll of adding machine tape in the form of a journal covering the period December 6, 1963, to January 10, 1964. Many think his Expressions at Sea Level, Corsons Inlet: A Book of Poems among his best work.

A two-time winner of the National Book Award, plus the Bollingen Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, Ammons published nearly thirty volumes of poetry, including Glare (1997), Garbage (1993), A Coast of Trees (1981), Sphere (1974), and Collected Poems 1951-1971 (1972). His many honors included the American Academy of American Poets’ 1998 Tanning Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal and the Ruth Lilly Prize, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His last book, Glare, was praised for its "riveting, iconoclastic freshness" by the judges who awarded him the $100,000 Tanning Prize. Despite his many accomplishments, upon learning of this singular Academy honor, Ammons cast his mind back to his early years as a struggling poet. "I greatly appreciate the recognition," he told an interviewer. "It rings back to the earliest days when there was no recognition or support—and it means a lot to hear those bells." The poet lived with his wife, Phyllis, in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor Emeritus of Poetry at Cornell.

Bio Source: http://www.ncwriters.org/arammons.htm