A.R. Ammons

Run Ragged

I said I don't want to be older, but it's be older
and older or nothing, right: and day by day

it's been older every day since the beginning:
still, there was a bracket of young years

within which one could say, these are not the
older years or the baby years: there are, as

Shakespeare said, groups of time, the
transitions from one group to another usually

unalarming: people who have nothing to say
should say nothing: they should drum syllables

or squeeze verbs (or nouns) or cast them like
die, craps, creeps: for example, I don't

feel at home in this universe and it may be
the only one: that is so pathetic: I think

that is so heartrending with content: 
how can the place you come from not be your

home: is the only way to make a phrase
interesting to make it sound like it's not a

phrase: or it could be two phrases or go two
different ways when you are really going nowhere

well, the human race needs a better track,
the track itself worn or grown over.

				31 March '98

Thrown for a Loop

There's so much more belief than truth, and
that is lucky in a way, belief inclining us
 	
more toward what we need than what we'll get:
but we really do believe what we believe and
 
we hope it will work out: but put a plug of 
gold on the scale opposite a sack full of 

painted feathers, truth will that great woven 
cluster outweigh: the fulcrum could be called

"getting along"--and that's where balanced
persons no doubt stand: those who slip down 

the arm toward feathers keep an eye back on 
truth, I'll bet, and those heavy with truth,

which is sometimes ruthlessly truth, oh, they
longingly look toward the painted fare: belief

can fulfill dramas of yearning, while truth's 
exactions narrow down the margins: but even

when it's a tightrope it's somewhere to walk, 
while dramas address theatrical appetites:

that truth and belief are one, cooperating one
with the other, that is simply GRAND, and they

sometimes do, aiming at heaven, cooperate: I
think that this means only that illusion plays

well against reality, though we have so much
trouble telling which is which, truth often

losing the figurements of its set up, and 
illusion as often floating off, a grain of

reality its core: there is a sufficient place
in the mind that turns away into the errors

of explanation just to be about: the sitting
center's butt gets tired, and the feet and 

legs can do with a little circulation, like
walking out into the country to chat with the

farmers, lend a hand, or help a calf stand up
in its freshest morning: do with the obvious:

little lies behind it....

Wrong Road

So I said to the short order cook (because I
think he owns the joint) what did Santa bring

you: a fairly aggressive bit of humor, since
I hardly know the man: my wife and I stop

there occasionally on the way to Syracuse
because it isn't busy, the eggs are right, and 

the waitresses so friendly: when he says, Oh,
some of this and that: so I said, a boat:

(checking to see if he was really rich): a 
gun, I said--maybe he was just one of the

guys: I have a lot of guns, he said: well, 
I don't think he ever did say what he got,

some clothes, maybe: he was turning too many
eggs, jigging hash browns: on the way to

Syracuse, I finished it in my head: he got
angry: who's asking, he says: so I try to

bring him down: I'm too old to rise up to 
risibility: I said, I'm a little older than 

you, so I was wondering, because I was disappointed
in myself when my wife asked me before Xmas

what I wanted for Christmas: I couldn't think
of anything: what does it mean to want nothing

from Santa: so I just wondered what sort of
thing you might have wanted, or if you had

liked what you got: well (reader) this last
part doesn't sound as good as the way it came

to me around Lafayette: I have a little tingle 
of fear that the next time I stop there, the

guy will say, listen, buddy, I'm old enough
you don't have to ask me what Santa brought me

and I'll say, well, it's Easter now, and I'm
not going to ask about those eggs....

---

A. R. Ammons wrote nearly thirty books of poetry, among them Glare (W. W. Norton, 1997); Garbage (1993), which won the National Book Award and the Library of Congress's Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; A Coast of Trees (1981), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Sphere (1974), which received the Bollingen Prize; and Collected Poems 1951-1971 (1972), which won the National Book Award. He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. A. R. Ammons died on February 25, 2001. contents | previous