garbage

remember that time i was reading a 121-page poem?
and i loved it?
and i wanted to share it with you?
but it was too long?

well here's the highlights.
enjoy.
hopefully as much as i did.


"...it just
goes to show you: moderation imposed is better

than no moderation at all: we tie into the
lives of those we love and our lives, then, go

as theirs go; their pain we can't shake off;
their choices, often harming to themselves,

pour through our agitated sleep, swirl up as
no-nos in our dreams..."


"garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual, believable enough

to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking, turning brooks brownish..."


"the new's an angle of emphasis on the old:
new religions are surfaces, beliefes the shadows

of images trying to construe what needs no
belief; only born die, and if something is

born on new, then that is not it, that is no
the it: the it is the indifference of all

differences, the nothingness of all the poised
somethigs, the finest issue of energy in which

boulders and dead stars float..."


"...because while the
prodigal stamps off and returns, the father goes

from iron directives that drove the son away
to rejoicing tears at his return: the safe

world of community, not safe, still needs
feelers send out to test the environment, to

to bring back news or no news; the cnetral
mover, the huge river, needs, too, to bend,

and the son sent away is doubtless welcomed home:
we deprive ourselves of, renounce, safety to seek

greater safety: but if we furnish a divine
sanction of theology to the disposition, we

must not think when the divine sanction shifts
that there is any alteration in the disposition..."


"...we

need nothing more, except the spelling out of
these for those inattentive or too busily lost

in the daily elaborations to prize the essential:
(1) don't complain -- ills are sufficiently

clear without reiterated description: (2) count
your blessing, spelling them over and over into

sharp contemplation: (3) do what you can --
take actionL (4) move on, keep the mind

allied with the figurations of ongoing..."


"...I've discovered
at sixty-three that the other thing I wished of

poetry, that it prevent death, has kept me a
little strange, that I have not got my feet out

of the embranglements of misapplication and out
into a clear space to go; that I have to start

again from a realization of failure: in fact,
having learned about commanding silence and

having, mostly by accident, commanded it a few
times, i've become afraid of convincingness..."


"it is the law of the jungle we have learned so
much from: but some would say the purpose of

living is to serve others or rule them, or to
write music, and some would say that being alive

is like being dead, but I would say that the
purpose though it might not always--or but

seldom--come through is still being alive..."


"even in the midst of passion plant the seed
whose vine or seed may hang you: things

not followed as risks are risky: being alive
means being alive to mischance's chances."


-garbage
A.R. Ammons