Amy Clampitt

Exmoor

Lost aboard the roll of Kodac- Olor that was to have super- Seded all need to remember Somerset were: a large flock Of winter-bedcover-thick- Pelted sheep up on the moor; A stile, a church

The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews

An ingenuity too astonishing To be quite fortuitous is This bog full of sundews, sphagnum- Lined and shaped like a teacup. A step Down and you’re into it; a Wilderness swallows you up: Ankle-,

Syrinx

Like the foghorn that’s all lung, The wind chime that’s all percussion, Like the wind itself, that’s merely air In a terrible fret, without so much As a finger to articulate What ails it,

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

While you walk the water’s edge, Turning over concepts I can’t envision, the honking buoy Serves notice that at any time The wind may change, The reef-bell clatters Its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra

Easter Morning

a stone at dawn Cold water in the basin These walls’ rough plaster Imageless After the hammering Of so much insistence On the need for naming After the travesties That passed as faces, Grace:

Vacant Lot With Pokeweed

Tufts, follicles, grubstake Biennial rosettes, a low- Life beach-blond scruff of Couch grass: notwithstanding The interglinting dregs Of wholesale upheaval and Dismemberment, weeds do not Hesitate, the wheeling Rise of the ailanthus halts At

A Catalpa Tree On West Twelfth Street

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

A Hedge Of Rubber Trees

The West Village by then was changing; before long The rundown brownstones at its farthest edge Would have slipped into trendier hands. She lived, Impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of Rubber trees,

A Silence

past parentage or gender Beyond sung vocables The slipped-between The so infinitesimal Fault line A limitless Interiority Beyond the woven Unicorn the maiden (man-carved worm-eaten) God at her hip Incipient The untransfigured Cottontail Bluebell

Fog

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;

A Hermit Thrush

Nothing’s certain. Crossing, on this longest day, The low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up The scree-slope of what at high tide Will be again an island, To where, a decade since well-being staked The slender, unpremeditated

Salvage

Daily the cortege of crumpled Defunct cars Goes by by the lasagna- Layered flatbed Truckload: hardtop Reverting to tar smudge, Wax shine antiqued to crusted Winepress smear, Windshield battered to Intact ice-tint, a rarity

On The Disadvantages Of Central Heating

cold nights on the farm, a sock-shod Stove-warmed flatiron slid under The covers, mornings a damascene- Sealed bizarrerie of fernwork decades ago now Waking in northwest London, tea Brought up steaming, a Peak Frean