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The Kingfisher
BY Amy Clampitt
In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud
they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming
beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening
of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed
by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled
the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening.
Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty-fifth Street
found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical,
acting the philistine, puncturing Stravinsky—“Tell
me, what was that racket in the orchestra about?”—
hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite,
a burnished, breathing wreck that didn’t hurt at all.
Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard
through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird
reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered.
When he mourned, “The poetry is gone,” she quailed,
seeing how his hands shook, sobered into feeling old.
By midnight, yet another fifth would have been killed.
A Sunday morning, the November of their cataclysm
(Dylan Thomas brought in in extremis to St. Vincent’s,
that same week, a symptomatic datum) found them
wandering a downtown churchyard. Among its headstones,
while from unruined choirs the noise of Christendom
poured over Wall Street, a benison in vestments,
a late thrush paused, in transit from some grizzled
spruce bog to the humid equatorial fireside: berry-
eyed, bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma
in the stigmata of its underparts—or so, too bruised
just then to have invented anything so fancy,
later, re-embroidering a retrospect, she had supposed.
In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then
dead silence) later, she could not have said how many
spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden,
how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one
insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down
screaming in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery;
a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color
of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow
through landscapes of untended memory: ardor
illuminating with its terrifying currency
now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista
but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow.
Dancers Exercising
BY Amy Clampitt
Frame within frame, the evolving conversation
is dancelike, as though two could play
at improvising snowflakes’
six-feather-vaned evanescence,
no two ever alike. All process
and no arrival: the happier we are,
the less there is for memory to take hold of,
or—memory being so largely a predilection
for the exceptional—come to a halt
in front of. But finding, one evening
on a street not quite familiar,
inside a gated
November-sodden garden, a building
of uncertain provenance,
peering into whose vestibule we were
arrested—a frame within a frame,
a lozenge of impeccable clarity—
by the reflection, no, not
of our two selves, but of
dancers exercising in a mirror,
at the center
of that clarity, what we saw
was not stillness
but movement: the perfection
of memory consisting, it would seem,
in the never-to-be-completed.
We saw them mirroring themselves,
never guessing the vestibule
that defined them, frame within frame,
contained two other mirrors.
On June 15, 1920, Roy Justin Clampitt, a farmer, and Lutie Pauline Felt, welcomed daughter Amy Clampitt into the world. The couple live on a 125 acre farm in New Providence, Iowa. Her parents were Quakers. Her childhood was spent in a small farming community. She started writing at a very early age. She wrote poetry throughout her high school years. Once she got to college she turned her focus to fiction, Clampitt attended Grinnell College. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree with honors in english. Clampitt went on to study for her graduate’s degree at Columbia University. She left before finishing. Upon leaving the college Clampitt started working as a secretary at the Oxford University Press.
In 1951 she left the Oxford University Press. Clampitt traveled overseas and spent five months exploring Europe. Upon her return to the states in 1952, she started working as a reference librarian at the Audubon Society. She worked there for the next eight years. During the 1960's and 70's Clampitt worked as a freelance editor and started working on writing poetry. In 1974 she published a small volume of poetry titled Multitudes, Multitudes; thereafter her work appeared frequently in the New Yorker. In 1977 she began working as an editor at E. P. Dutton. She worked there until 1982, when she quit to focus solely on her writing, with an occasional semester of teaching at a college.
At the age of sixty-three she published her first full-length book of poetry, ”The Kingfisher.”, this collection made her well-known as an American poet. Over the next ten years Clampitt published five books of poetry. “What the Light Was Like” was published in 1985. Followed by ”Archaic Figure” in 1987 and ”Westward” in 1990. Her last book ”A Silence Opens,” was published in 1994. Clampitt was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, and in 1984 of an Academy Fellowship. Clampitt was made a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1992. She was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. WShe taught at several colleges over the years,The College of William and Mary, Amherst College, and Smith College.
Clampitt spent the last years of her life writing for journals and magazines. She never married. In the spring of 1993 she moved to Lenox Massachusetts. Six months later she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Amy Clampitt died on September 10, 1994, she was seventy-four years old. "The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt" was published posthumously in 1997.
Fog by
Amy Clampitt
A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands' spruce-tips
drunk up like milk in the
universal emulsion; houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean.
Tactile
definition, however, has not been
totally banished: hanging
tassel by tassel, panicled
foxtail and needlegrass,
dropseed, furred hawkweed,
and last season's rose-hips
are vested in silenced
chimes of the finest,
clearest sea-crystal.
Opacity
opens up rooms, a showcase
for the hueless moonflower
corolla, as Georgia
O'Keefe might have seen it,
of foghorns; the nodding
campanula of bell buoys;
the ticking, linear
filigree of bird voices.
A Catalpa Tree On West Twelfth Street
by Amy Clampitt
While the sun stops, or
seems to, to define a term
for the indeterminable,
the human aspect, here
in the West Village, spindles
to a mutilated dazzle—
niched shards of solitude
embedded in these brownstone
walkups such that the Hudson
at the foot of Twelfth Street
might be a thing that's
done with mirrors: definition
by deracination—grunge,
hip-hop, Chinese takeout,
co-ops—while the globe's
elixir caters, year by year,
to the resurgence of this
climbing tentpole, frilled and stippled
yet again with bloom
to greet the solstice:
What year was it it over-
took the fire escape? The
roof's its next objective.
Will posterity (if there
is any)pause to regret
such layerings of shade,
their cadenced crests' trans-
valuation of decay, the dust
and perfume of an all
too terminable process?
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winner of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] is:
Fall Song
The wind borne leaves rise
As autumn rushes into winter,
The pulse of the land slows.
Some despair as the winter sleep
Comes upon the woods.
As if some escape from time
Were to break the chains of fate.
But the ash trees know the rhythm
Of the years, to train the patience
Of nature’s long slow song.
Honorable mention:
"Colors"
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Poetry: August 09, 2023 Issue [#12112]
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