The Complete Poems of A R Ammons, Volume 2 Read online

  THE COMPLETE POEMS OF A. R. AMMONS

  VOLUME 2

  1978–2005

  Edited by Robert M. West

  Introduction by Helen Vendler

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  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION by Helen Vendler

  SIX-PIECE SUITE (1978)

  I (“led by words into a multiplicity of contact . . .”)

  II (“poetry though a big sport helps one bear . . .”)

  III (“so many things sound contradictory . . .”)

  IV (“hope until there is no hope . . .”)

  V (“the years pile up substanceless . . .”)

  VI (“how snow can cling . . .”)

  A COAST OF TREES (1981)

  Coast of Trees

  Swells

  Continuing

  In Memoriam Mae Noblitt

  Weather-Bound

  Where

  Strolls

  Getting Through

  Eventually Is Soon Enough

  Density

  Vehicle

  Response

  Easter Morning

  White Dwarf

  Distraction

  Rapids

  Neighbors

  Keepsake

  Antithesis

  Traveling Shows

  Breaking Out

  Range

  Dry Spell Spiel

  Mountain Wind

  Night Finding

  Fourth Dimension

  Country Music

  Wiring

  Sunday at McDonald’s

  Sweetened Change

  Parting

  Feel Like Traveling On

  Poverty

  Givings

  An Improvisation for the Stately Dwelling

  An Improvisation for Jerald Bullis

  Persistences

  WORLDLY HOPES (1982)

  Room Conditioner

  Extravaganza

  Righting Wrongs

  Subsumption

  Immoderation

  Vines

  Extrication

  Spruce Woods

  I Went Back

  Snow Roost

  Shading Flight In

  Precious Weak Fields

  Night Chill

  Calling

  Reaction Rates

  Progress Report

  Lost & Found

  Epistemology

  The Role of Society in the Artist

  Scribbles

  Hermit Lark

  Shit List

  Limits

  Sizing

  Bride

  Rainy Morning

  The Scour

  Meditation

  Oblivion’s Bloom

  Immortality

  Design

  Augmentations in Early March

  Working Differentials

  Winter Sanctuaries

  Cold Spell

  Hollows

  Volitions

  Providence

  Going Without Saying

  Devastation

  Merchandise

  Pairing

  Rivulose

  LAKE EFFECT COUNTRY (1983)

  The Bright Side

  Zero and Then Some

  Localizing

  Theories of Height

  The Spiral Rag

  The Fairly High Assimilation Rag

  I Could Not Be Here At All

  Written Water

  Retiring

  Nature Poetry

  Holding Still

  Windy Morning with a Little Sleet

  Playback

  Positive Edges

  On Being

  By the Boulder Cluster the Wind

  Instancing

  Trigger

  Apologetics

  Songlet

  Is the Only Enough None

  Giving Up Words with Words

  Settling Up

  Negative Pluses

  Yadkin Picnic

  Laces

  The Only Way Around Is Through

  Old Desire

  Making Room

  Exchangers

  Lips Twisted with Thirst

  The Eclipse Goes by Drawing

  Dusk Water

  Pet Panther

  Singling & Doubling Together

  Motioning

  Love’s Motions

  Helping Hand

  Debris

  Coming Round

  Dismantlings

  Down Low

  We, We Ourselves

  Measuring Points

  Section

  Buttermilk Falls

  Spring Vacation

  Meeting Place

  SUMERIAN VISTAS (1987)

  1: The Ridge Farm

  1 (“The lean, far-reaching, hung-over sway . . .”)

  2 (“last night, the wind clunked . . .”)

  3 (“a poet hands me his poem and says . . .”)

  4 (“if nature could speak . . .”)

  5 (“knowledge, perception, this action . . .”)

  6 (“there is no tedium, apparently . . .”)

  7 (“some branches . . .”)

  8 (“we went for a raw walk . . .”)

  9 (“cauliflowers are either real or . . .”)

  10 (“the clumps and small reservoirs . . .”)

  11 (“rather than the play of the mind . . .”)

  12 (“how to exclude the central . . .”)

  13 (“I like the ridge, its rolls my fixed ocean . . .”)

  14 (“I’ve had all the apples . . .”)

  15 (“considering mutability and muck . . .”)

  16 (“nature that roots under us . . .”)

  17 (“we live again in the bellies . . .”)

  18 (“I go to nature not because . . .”)

  19 (“I wouldn’t give up a hair . . .”)

  20 (“when the hand falls apart . . .”)

  21 (“heaven can be as purified . . .”)

  22 (“once you’ve caught the notion . . .”)

  23 (“slice thirty degrees off the summer . . .”)

  24 (“last year we got this strawberry . . .”)

  25 (“the rat was a mole . . .”)

  26 (“there is something about . . .”)

  27 (“I like, as I have said before . . .”)

  28 (“it doesn’t matter to me if issues . . .”)

  29 (“I wake from a nap . . .”)

  30 (“words cast up . . .”)

  31 (“I was this . . .”)

  32 (“today Jerry, Fran, Phyllis and I went . . .”)

  33 (“I’m split but not . . .”)

  34 (“don’t think we don’t . . .”)

  35 (“wherever mortality sets up a net . . .”)

  36 (“straitened narrow, river-wound . . .”)

  37 (“everyone watches the world end once . . .”)

  38 (“I don’t care if I don’t tell the truth . . .”)

  39 (“in the small walks & chasms . . .”)

  40 (“the honeysucklebushes already weighty . . .”)

  41 (“we were talking about our MFA program . . .”)

  42 (“minutiae is a fussy word . . .”)

  43 (“the high farm beseeches my mind . . .”)

  44 (“sweeps of space haunt the slopes . . .”)

  45 (“the thought that . . .”)

  46 (“culture, hardened . . .”)

  47 (“peeling the bark off a crabapple . . .”)

  48 (“at dusk rabbits settle . . .”)

  49 (“little showers yesterday evening . . .”)

  50 (“a light catches somewhere . . .”)

  51 (�
��I like nature poetry . . .”)

  2: Tombstones

  1 (“the chisel, chipping . . .”)

  2 (“it breaks the heart . . .”)

  3 (“the ground flat . . .”)

  4 (“set on the line . . .”)

  5 (“the spirit, though . . .”)

  6 (“but why put a stone there . . .”)

  7 (“rivulets of scattering . . .”)

  8 (“dust’s shape in air . . .”)

  9 (“the stone-name signifies . . .”)

  10 (“as if the name . . .”)

  11 (“the grooves fill with moss . . .”)

  12 (“a mockingbird sings . . .”)

  13 (“the wind roars, sweeps, whirls . . .”)

  14 (“a stone sinks in soil . . .”)

  15 (“when gliding perhaps under a glacier . . .”)

  16 (“stones, names in them . . .”)

  17 (“what does it matter . . .”)

  18 (“stones, as if forms of intelligence . . .”)

  19 (“the things of earth are not objects . . .”)

  20 (“the stone makes . . .”)

  21 (“not coarse, hard . . .”)

  22 (“if love is fine . . .”)

  23 (“the light in an eye . . .”)

  24 (“the universe is itself . . .”)

  25 (“nothing, though, not stone . . .”)

  26 (“if the tombstones . . .”)

  27 (“a flock . . .”)

  28 (“this boundary stone plunked down . . .”)

  29 (“the letters . . .”)

  3: Motions’ Holdings

  Questionable Procedures

  Frost’s Foretellings

  20 January

  Early Indications

  Loft

  Chiseled Clouds

  Scaling Desire

  Tertiaries

  Upper Limits

  Laboratory Materials

  A Tendency to Ascendancy

  Information Density

  Stone Keep

  Autonomy

  Backcasting

  Checking Out the Resources

  Dominion (“Glittery river, I said . . .”)

  Hairy Belly

  Entranceways

  Dominant Margins

  Power Plays

  Target

  Postulation

  Subsidiary Roles

  Working Out

  Remembering Old Caves

  Becoming Become Of

  Holding Sway

  The Dwelling

  The Hubbub

  Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

  Red Shift

  Saving Spending

  Long Sorrowing

  Eidos

  White Passages

  A Way Away

  Pots and Pans

  Aquarium Watch

  Earliest Recollection

  Liquidities

  Surgeons

  Motion’s Holdings

  Burnout in the Overshoot

  Telling Moves

  Coming Round

  Recoveries

  Trivial Means

  Tracing Out

  Some Any

  Memory

  Sight Seed

  Negative Symbiosis

  Citified

  PREVIOUSLY UNCOLLECTED POEMS FROM THE REALLY SHORT POEMS OF A. R. AMMONS (1990)

  Weathering

  Hype

  Over and Done With

  Cousins

  Equilibrations

  Second Party

  Digging Wonder

  Tryst

  Success Story

  Glacials

  Stoning Stone

  Substantial Planes

  Settlement

  Deaf Zone

  Scarecrow

  Filling in the Dots

  Figuring Belief

  Crinkling Trails

  Cracking a Few Hundred Million Years

  Soul’s Seas

  Clarifications

  Celestial Dealings

  Waking

  Glass Specialty

  Pedagogy Agog

  Touching

  Planet Actions

  Worky Shallows

  Still Frame

  This

  Spring Tornado

  Bottommost

  Time Spans

  Crow Ride

  Roundel

  Calling

  That Day

  Poetry to the Rescue

  Ah

  Pebble’s Story

  Whitelash of Air Rapids

  Late November

  Leaning Up

  Twangs & Little Twists

  Night Post

  Late Look

  Grove’s Way

  Nearing Equinox

  Circling Splinters

  Squall Ball

  Teleology

  Negligence These Days

  Theory Center

  Around Here

  Salute

  Grisly Grit

  Close Relations

  Spring Clearing

  Resurrections

  Course Work

  Quit That

  Swoggled

  Likely Story

  Market Adviser

  Stills

  Bulletin

  The Upshot

  Milepost

  Coming Right Up

  Their Sex Life

  Kingpin

  Kith

  Layabout

  Resolve

  Cold Rheum

  Reorganization

  Preexistence

  Permanence

  Orchard

  Lost and Found

  Capture

  GARBAGE (1993)

  1 (“Creepy little creepers . . .”)

  2 (“garbage has to be the poem of our time . . .”)

  3 (“toxic waste, poison air, beach goo . . .”)

  4 (“scientists plunge into matter . . .”)

  5 (“dew shatters into rivulets . . .”)

  6 (“a pain in the knee or hipjoint . . .”)

  7 (“is it all going to be like this . . .”)

  8 (“sometimes old people snap back . . .”)

  9 (“you don’t want to succeed too early . . .”)

  10 (“in your end is my beginning, I repeat . . .”)

  11 (“an early June morning in early June . . .”)

  12 (“a waste of words . . .”)

  13 (“the real trouble with a blabbermouth . . .”)

  14 (“take, in leavetaking, the leavings . . .”)

  15 (“what are we to think of the waste, though . . .”)

  16 (“a bird dabbed me, a virgin soil . . .”)

  17 (“the heap of knickknacks . . .”)

  18 (“should I go on, fearful of the phobias . . .”)

  BRINK ROAD (1996)

  A Sense of Now

  Picking Up Equations

  Enameling

  Up-Country

  Sparklings

  Cool Intimacies

  Fascicle

  Loving People

  Standing Light Up

  Establishment

  Broad Brush

  First Cold

  Regards Regardless

  The Time Rate of Change

  Greeting Verses

  Mind Stone

  Downing Lines

  Whitewater

  Erminois

  Construing Deconstruction

  Elite Street

  Good Morning, This Morning

  Walking Song

  Sentiment

  Anxiety’s Prosody

  The Land of the Knobble-Jobble Tree

  Capabilities

  Minutial Impress

  Showups

  Modes Against Too Much

  Sky Rides

  Heights Known

  Conservationist

  A Little Thing Like That

  Getting About

  December Starlings

  Strings

  Winding Up

  Middling Seasons

  Looking Way Off


  Obsession

  Anger Tangle

  The Deep Slow

  Saying Saying Away

  Line Drawings

  Prey

  Very High Condition

  The Category of Last Resort

  The Clenched-Jaw School

  Ceppagna

  Pit Lines

  Silvering Shadow

  Abscission

  Microinscriptions

  Readings by Ways

  Abandon

  Local Antiquities

  Changing Stations

  Collapsed Structures

  Flat Rock

  Flurries

  The Deep End

  Reasoning Power

  Tenacities

  Blues in the Valley

  Packaging

  Serpent Country

  Early Stones

  Connecting Misses

  Evasive Actions

  Tenure’s Pleasures

  Pressing On

  The Story

  Period

  The Way of One’s Desire

  Hurricane

  The Crystal Tree

  A Pretty Looking Sight

  Focus

  God Is the Sense the World Makes Without God

  Painlessness, to Pain, Is Paradise

  Flaws in Dominance

  How Things Go Wrong

  Eternity’s Taciturnity

  Killing Stuff Off

  Boon

  Downstream

  Ruin’s the Palace of Commencement

  Holding Heights

  Walking About in the Evening

  Museums

  Second-Rate Perfection

  The Planet That Was There

  Terebene Scene

  Rain Gauges

  Safe

  Reading Ta’o Chien

  Geezerly

  An Improvisation for Soot and Suet

  An Improvisation for the Killers of Meat

  Reckless Endangerment

  Swimming Night

  Ontology Precedes Teleology

  Disclaimer

  Spike-Tooth Harrows

  Picking Where Out of When

  Odysseus for Eva Maria Rodtwitt

  High Desiring

  The Damned

  What Was That Again

  Prisons There and Not

  Moving Figures

  All’s All

  Hard and Fast

  So Long, Descartes

  Marginals

  Day Ghosts

  Next to Nothing

  For My Beloved Son

  Outlines of Absence

  Same Old Story

  Beautiful Woman

  Cognoscenti

  Continuity

  Gung Ho

  Appendix

  Stand-In

  Magic

  Rarities

  Old Geezer

  Financial Services

  Rolling Reality

  Thresher

  Putting on Airs

  Superstars

  Standing on the Corner Watching All the Wheels Go By

  Home Place

  Postmodernist Views

  Expropriations

  Nitty Gritty

  Enfield Falls

  The Many Ways Not Supreme

  Sojourning

  Death and Silhouettes

  Fall’s End

  A Part for the Whole

  Lofty Calling

  Weightlessness

  Rosy Transients

  The Incomplete Life

  Chosen Roads