From ‘The Prairie’, by Amy Clampitt
- Share via
To be landless, half a nomad, nowhere wholly
at home, is to discover, now, an epic theme
in going back. The rootless urge that took
my father’s father to Dakota, to California,
impels me there. A settled continent: what
does it mean? I think of nights, half wakeful,
under the roof of their last house, the haven
I knew it as long gone, whoever lives there,
its streetlit solitudes, the clock’s tock,
the wooing snuffle of a freight train traveling
along a right of way whose dislodged sleepers now
lie scattered like the bones of mastodons.
I think of Dakota, the wind-raked shelterbelts,
the silos’ hived anxiety, the trembling
B-52s. I think of Pasadena: date palms,
hibiscus, pepper trees, the feckless charm
found mainly in the habitat of earthquakes:
half-kempt, aging bungalows gone bridal
under a flowery surfeiting of vines: the desert
fanned, sprinkled, seductive from its bath
of purloined rainbows. North Raymond
not quite a slum; a niggling tenderness
for the outmoded thrives on the scandal
of ways lost, of names gone under. No one
I know or ever heard of lives there now.
On Summit, from some long-obliterated
snapshot, I thought I recognized the house
a great-aunt lived in once: the number
not quite right, the tenant an old
deaf Mexican who did not understand.
From “The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt” by Amy Clampitt (Alfred A. Knopf: 478 pp., $30) Copyright 1997 Reprinted by permission.
