A.R. Ammons, "Tree Limbs Down"

I just found this while paging through the latest New Yorker and was powerfully struck by it. This is such an American poem, with its guilt and its need to want, and its repletion. I woke up a few years ago, myself, and realized I had pretty much every material thing I wanted. It was a crisis of sorts. I felt adrift, unpatriotic. I read serious books on consumerism and national identity. I thought a lot about privilege. This poem is a perfect glimpse of what that felt like.

Tree Limbs Down

The poverty of having everything is not
wanting anything: I trudge down the mall halls

and I see nothing wanting which would pick me
up: I stop at a cheap $79 piece of jewelry,

a little necklace dangler, and it has a diamond
chip in it hardly big enough to sparkle, but it

sparkles: a piece of junk, symbolically vast;
imagine, a life with a little sparkle in it, a

little sparkles like wanting something, like
wanting a little piece of shining, maybe the

world's smallest ruby: but if you have everything
the big carats are merely heavy with price and

somebody, maybe, trying to take you over: the dull
game of the comers-on, waiting everywhere like

moray eels poked out of holes: what did Christ
say, sell everything and give to the poor, and

immediacy enters; daily bread is the freshest
kind: dates, even, laid up in old larders, are

they sweet: come off sheets of the golden
desert, knees weak and mouth dry, what would

you think of an oasis, a handful of dates, and
a clear spring breaking out from under some stones:

but suppose bread can't daily be found or no
oasis materializes among the shimmers: lining

the outside of immediacy, alas, is uncertainty:
so the costly part of the crust of morning

bread is not knowing it will be there: it has
been said by others, though few, that nothing

is got for nothing: so I am reconciled: I
traipse my dull self down the aisles of

desire and settle for nothing, nothing wanted,
nothing spent, nothing got.

(From The New Yorker, March 15, 2005).