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.

The gooseberry’s no doubt an oddity, an outlaw or pariah even—thorny and tart as any kindergarten martinet, it can harbor like a fernseed, on its leaves’ under- side, bad news for pine trees, whereas the spruce resists the blister rust it’s host to. That veiny Chinese lantern, its stolid jelly of a fruit, not only has no aroma but is twice as tedious as the wild strawberry’s sunburst stem-end appendage: each one must be between-nail-snipped at both extremities. Altogether, gooseberry virtues take some getting used to, as does trepang, tripe à la mode de Caen, or having turned thirteen. The acerbity of all things green and adolescent lingers in it—the arrogant, shrinking, prickling-in-every-direction thorn- iness that loves no company except its, or anyhow that’s what it gets: bristling up through gooseberry ghetto sprawl are braced thistles’ silvery, militantly symmetrical defense machineries. Likewise inseparably en- tangled in the disarray of an uncultivated childhood, where gooseberry bushes (since rooted out) once flourished, is the squandered volupté of lemon- yellow-petaled roses’ luscious flimflam— an inkling of the mingling into one experience of suave and sharp, whose supremely im- probable and far-fetched culinary embodiment is a gooseberry fool. Tomorrow, having stumbled into this trove of chief ingredients (the other being very thickest cream) I’ll demonstrate it for you. Ever since, four summers ago, I first brought you, a gleeful Ariel, the trophy of a small sour handful, I’ve wondered what not quite articulated thing could render magical the green globe of an unripe berry. I think now it was simply the great globe itself’s too much to carry. December 1981

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.

Force of reason, who shut up the shrill foul Furies in the dungeon of the Parthenon, led whimpering to the cave they live in still, beneath the rock your city foundered on: who, equivocating, taught revenge to sing (or seem to, or be about to) a kindlier tune: mind that can make a scheme of anything— a game, a grid, a system, a mere folder in the universal file drawer: uncompromising mediatrix, virgin married to the welfare of the body politic: deific contradiction, warbonnet-wearing olive-bearer, author of the law’s delays, you who as talisman and totem still wear the aegis, baleful with Medusa’s scowl (though shrunken and self-mummified, a Gorgon still): cool guarantor of the averted look, the guide of Perseus, who killed and could not kill the thing he’d hounded to its source, the dread thing-in-itself none can elude, whose counter- feit we halfway hanker for: aware (gone mad with clarity) we have invented all you stand for, though we despise the artifice—a space to savor horror, to pre-enact our own undoing in— living, we stare into the mirror of the Gorgon.