after The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons
Today your book arrived, one book in two slab oblongs
(a ball-buster), and I had to start reading before I could breathe:
stretches of it I’d swum or slogged through, then shimmied
each volume into place till the alpha shelf sagged, but oh,
I had no idea—no grasp of the muchness parceled out over
your writing life (over how many years, I wondered, and just
now did the math: 50-plus), every raveled verse of it shining
like a rush of sun on some windy estuary, brightest, it seemed,
in those commodious reaches I hadn’t yet waded in, where I
stumbled on, for example, this: “I went to the art school but
everything hung up looked hanged, and I said, everything
is beautiful except man’s work, why is that, why is that,
for whom”—and it seemed I’d suddenly been stood up
like a length of cedar lattice on a gusty midwinter day, your
bleakness blowing through the mesh—despair and eloquence,
one wind—and a lucidity withal not borne by that wind but
commingled in it as in a spray or wave of light that in its flight
through emptiness is cleansed of angst, misery, rage, the fall
from our all-fathering star a blessing, although the star itself
is bound at last to gasp and dissolve into a bath of spectral reds,
none of which our kind will witness, having long since given up
griefs large and little, the Many and the One, yours and mine.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 2.
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate (2014-2019), has published 20 collections, most recently Under Sleep’s New Moon; The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015; and Marked Men. His poems have appeared widely in journals—including Adirondack Review, New York Quarterly, Naugatuck River Review, and Pedestal—and in several anthologies, including New Poets of the American West and A Ritual to Read Together: Poems In Conversation with William Stafford. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver.
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