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Losing Track of Language
The train leaps toward Italy, the French Riviera
falls away in the dark, the rails sing dimeter
shifting to trimeter, a galopade to a galliard.
We sit wedged among strangers; whatever
we once knew (it was never much) of each other
falls away with the landscape. Words
fall away, we trade instead in flirting
and cigarettes; we’re all rapport with strangers.
The one with the yellow forlock that keeps falling
and being shaken back again, syncopating
the dimeter-trimeter, galopade-into-galliard,
is, it seems, Italian—recently a pilgrim
to the Vaucluse, where Petrarca,
to the noise of waterfalls, measured out
his strict stanzas, little rooms
for turmoil to grow lucid in, for
change to put on more durable
leaves of bronze, a scapular of marble.
A splutter of pleasure at hearing the name
is all he needs, and he’s off
like a racehorse at the Palio—plunging
unbridled into recited cadenzas, three-beat
lines interleaving a liquid pentameter
What are words? They fall away into the fleeing
dark of the French Riviera, as once a shower
of bloom, une pioggia di fior, descended
into the lap of Trecent her hair
all gold and pearl, the grass still warm
as when she sat there, six centuries
gone by; that squandered heartbeat
(the black plague took her, young) now
fossilized as bronze, as carved laurel.
Whatever is left of her language;
and what is language but breath, leaves,
petals fallen or in the act of falling, pollen
of turmoil that sifts through the fingers?
—E conosce (I ask it to keep the torrent
of words from ending, ever) anche Sappho? Yes,
he knows, he will oblige. The limpid pentameter
gives way to something harsher: diphthongs
condense, take on an edge of bronze. Though
I don’t understand a word, what are words? Do these
concern one Timas, led before she was married
(or so one leaf of what’s left would have it)
to the dark bedroom of Persephone, for so long
nowhere at home, either here or there, forever
returning and falling back again
into the dark of these ten thousand years?
The train leaps toward Italy; words fall away
through the dark into the dark bedroom
of everything left behind, the unendingness
of things lost track of—of who, of where—
where I’m losing track of language. The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lines and shaped like a teacup.
A step
down and you’re into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted
understory, an overhead
spruce-tamarack horizon hinting
you’ll never get out of here.
But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they’re set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand believing,
that either
a First Cause said once, “Let there
be sundews,” and there were, or they’ve
made their way here unaided
other than by that backhand, round-
about refusal to assume responsibility
known as Natural Selection.
But the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in that cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.
Nothing Stays Put In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985 The strange and wonderful are too much with us.
The protea of the antipodes—a great,
globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom—
for sale in the supermarket! We are in
our decadence, we are not entitled.
What have we done to deserve
all the produce of the tropics—
this fiery trove, the largesse of it
heaped up like cannonballs, these pineapples, bossed
and crested, standing like troops at attention,
these tiers, these balconies of green, festoons
grown sumptuous with stoop labor?
The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us
before there is a yen or a need for it. The green-
grocers, uptown and down, are from South Korea.
Orchids, opulence by the pailful, just slightly
fatigued by the plane trip from Hawaii, are
disposed on the sidewalks; alstroemerias, freesias
fattened a bit in translation from overseas; gladioli
likewise estranged from their piercing ancestral crimson;
as well as, less altered from the original blue cornflower
of the roadsides and railway embankments of Europe, these
bachelor’s buttons. But it isn’t the railway embankments
their featherweight wheels of cobalt remind me of, it’s
a row of them among prim colonnades of cosmos,
snapdragon, nasturtium, bloodsilk red poppies,
in my grandmother’s garden: a prairie childhood,
the grassland shorn, overlaid with a grid,
unsealed, furrowed, harrowed and sown with immigrant grasses,
their massive corduroy, their wavering feltings embroidered
here and there by the scarlet shoulder patch of cannas
on a courthouse lawn, by a love knot, a cross stitch
of living matter, sown and tended by women,
nurturers everywhere of the strange and wonderful,
beneath whose hands what had been alien begins,
as it alters, to grow as though it were indigenous.
But at this remove what I think of as
strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan
on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom,
a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above—
is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift
of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood.
Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.
All that we know, that we’re
made of, is motion. from The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (Knopf, 1999) |
