ALARM-CLOCK, LAST CHANCE, LA LA LA
Warmest recorded year, Russian wildfires and wheat failure, Pakistan's unprecedented flooding with cholera chaser. Each new shudder of the Earth prompts a millisecond of recognition that we are mid-cataclysm, before we sag and return to standard programming.
The work of Amy Clampitt is just as resistant to disaggregation as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, yet lines from both have been swimming through my head.
[T]he seethe of entity
undoes what's done,
the sieve unselves,
the drift within
proceeds from dark
to dark, from rift to
rift, from mooring
to castoff
off uncharted
continental shelves
(Continental Drift, Clampitt)
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
(God's Grandeur, Hopkins).
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
'There lives the deepest freshness deep down things...'
ReplyDeletebut for how long?
(o)
ReplyDeleteI'm not familiar with Amy Clampitt. I like this, especially (as with Hopkins) out loud.
ReplyDeleteDo take a look at Clampitt, as she manages with exaction to avoid, despite unstinting detail, the dense Black Hole that you and I have discussed. Rich cake rather than indigestible scone.
ReplyDeleteA major poet with a unique tone, she is aptly described by Mona Van Duyn as the love-child of Hopkins and Marianne Moore (and perhaps niece of John Clare).
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First ventured into
in mid-July, the bog's sodden hollow
muffled the uproar of the shore
it hunkered in the lee of. Wrung residues
of sphagnum moss steeped in self-
manufactured acids stained the habitat's
suffusing waters brown,
to feed the red-
haired, hair-trigger sundews' mazy glint,
the ground-level pseudo-pomegranate
drowning dens of pitcher plants. Sheer dearth,
a poverty of nitrogen, they tell us,
is what turned this vegetation predatory
as the blood-craving
blackflies and
mosquitoes it has evolved its several
macabre ways of preying on. Bog
laurel and lambkill distil a nectar and a
petty poison of their own. Rancor
is rarely simple, least so in the dank
sector of organic
chemistry.
(from Cloudberry Summer).
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Beach Glass
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
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty—
driftwood and shipwreck, last night's
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic —with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag
ot touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration.
The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles
have been abandoned here, it's hopeless
to know which to salvage. Instead
I keep a lookout for beach glass—
amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase
of Almadén and Gallo, lapis
by way of (no getting around it,
I'm afraid) Phillips'
Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare
translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst
of no known origin.
The process
goes on forever: they came from sand,
they go back to gravel,
along with treasuries
of Murano, the buttressed
astonishments of Chartres,
which even now are readying
for being turned over and over as gravely
and gradually as an intellect
engaged in the hazardous
redefinition of structures
no one has yet looked at.