Exmoor

by Amy Clampitt (from 'The Kingfisher')

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 spire,
and an excess, at Porlock,

of tenderly barbarous antique
thatch in tandem with flower-
beds, relentlessly pictur-
esque, along every sidewalk;

a millwheel; and a millbrook
running down brown as beer.
Exempt from the disaster,
however, as either too quick

or too subtle to put on rec-
ord, were these: the flutter
of, beside that brown water,
with a butterfly-like flick

of fan-wings, a bright black-
and-yellow wagtail; at Dulver-
ton on the moor, the flavor
of the hot toasted teacake

drowning in melted butter
we had along with a bus-tour-
load of old people; the driver

's way of smothering every r
in the wool of a West Countr-
y diphthong, and as a Somer-

set man, the warmth he had for
the high, wild, heather-
dank wold he drove us over.

goodbye new york

This morning I am eating steaming hot microwave sausage, and drinking flowery French black tea (with milk and brown sugar). The tea is called Mariage Freres 'Marco Polo', and comes in the most beautiful black and yellow tin. In France you can buy this tea in bulk at a miniscule store in the Marais, just try not to "accidentally" order a rare Chinese breakfast tea that will cost you 20 euro for a small bag.

The sun is streaming in my window-- I am wrapped in blankets, it is around 10 degrees in New York today. I am enjoying my last January here in this apartment-- I have made the decision to leave in March. I know this is the right decision because I woke up this morning as a newer, much lighter body--(head stretched to the wall, lazy feet diagonal). It feels good to stretch against this perimeter of fear that surrounds me in this-- the shock of doing something that is pure action-- active, new, and fully NOW.

At this present moment I cling to myself, and my work. This is one of the first times that my work/research has been the sustaining thing in my life. I don't know why I was holding on to the idea of this apartment being my constant (close on 3 years), what will really hold me up is the web of knowledge and poetic scraps, books, articles, thought screens/scaffolds that I have built up these past three years for myself. I was looking at my school transcript yesterday. For the last two years I have gotten straight A's (minus one B+), in NYC Art History GRAD school.

When I think about the ways I have taken my assignments, papers, tasks and expanded them to overlap with each other, and my continuing interests, I am so proud of myself. I have studied Japonisme at the turn of the century in silver vessels, English art pottery of the inter-War years, environmentally "friendly" and healthy houses in California (house as membrane), the Pueblo photographs of Laura Gilpin around Taos, NM, earthships, colonial landcape history all over our country from the 1500's on, French green arsenic-dyed wallpaper from 1715, rococo, Italian landscape and palace design of the 16th century, Renaissance gem and mineral collecting, old lapidary and medical texts, fold-out German anatomy books, Persian miniatures, Delacroix's watercolor sketches and journals from Morocco, Orientalism, Foucault, Said, Homi Bhaba, Shazia Sikander, the designs of IDEO, 16th-17th century French palaces and country houses, Boulle furniture and clocks, natural history dioramas!!!!!!

How does it happen that we start to own what we have studied? It becomes such a seamless, interwoven part of our own being it is hard to separate the strands from the fabric-- one from another. I guess I always have lived in my head-- but it seems to me the best writers are the ones that can identify each their own thought process and most accurately dumbly roughly dull-wittedly capture a coherent strain of this thought. To be comfortable with each and every current silly passing superficial or awkward thing that I write should slowly accelerate the timbre and polished quality of my own personal voice. I want to practice this, and become at ease with each flitting passing random profound facet of thought.

I am wrapped in brown flannel sheets that, admittedly, need to be washed. I really am too cold, and too languidly at ease with the books around my head (spread like caught insects on my bedspread) for this to happen. The walk from my apartment to the laundromat is not a long one, but it can be a humiliating one, walking past the bodegas trailing pink sheets and towels. It also takes some backbone emotional resolve to get (always) stuck waiting at the traffic light-- making awkward somewhat fearful eye-contact with the drivers of screaming semi-trucks rounding the corner of our block.

I am simmering small green french lentils on the stove, in my seasoned cast-iron pan. I cut up three huge cloves of garlic, half a white onion, one small tomato, and deglazed with a healthy dose of old white cooking wine, a dash of sherry and some deep amber colored chicken stock. It makes me feel so calm to have this cooking slowly on the stove, turning itself magically into a meal (maybe with a hard boiled egg on the side, lots of coarse sea salt and black pepper).

I may have been inspired by the A.J. Liebling book, 'Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris' that I am reading this morning, also the two Colette novels I just finished. Also, ever-present in my mind is the rising mirage of a far West Texas kitchen, with windows out to the backyard/desert/sky. The first thing I noticed about this kitchen were old-fashioned glassed shallow cupboards for dishes. I knew that my gold striped glassware would fit perfectly. The dish obsession has died down, I am down to essential remnants now. For Christmas Sam gave me a whole set of Japanese inspired china-- white with small pine cones and needles. There is a tall coffee pot and ornate small coffee cups. These will be perfect, and new. I can picture them lined in the cupboards, just so, like stiff but hopeful friends.....

(happy long sigh).

colette

In the house a lamp behind the sitting-room window suddenly glows red and the Little One shivers. All that had looked green up to the moment before, now turns blue around this motionless red flame. The child's hand, trailing in the grass, is suddenly aware of the evening damp. It is the hour of lamps. Leaves rustle together with a sound like the plash of running water and the door of the hayloft flaps against the wall as it does in a winter gale. ('my mother's house', 24)

cut all of my pictures in half........

walt whitman

Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam
Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring
When I first read the lines, rife as the loam
Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping!
....My hand
in yours,
(Hart Crane, 'The Bridge')



Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves, the other side of me,
Paumanok there and then I thought the old thought of likenesses,
These you presented to me you fish-shaped island...
('Sea Drift')

winter

In between the warm pages of cooking magazines, and holiday catalogs, i sit for a minute and breathe into a part of this poem......

'black buttercups'

"in march, the farmer's month
for packing up and moving on, the rutted
mud potholed with glare, the verb 'to move'
connoted nothing natural, such as the shifting
of the course of streams or of the sun's
position, sap moving up, or even,
couples dancing. What the stripped root, exhumed
above the mudhole's brittle skin, discerned
was exile"....

(amy clampitt, from 'what the light was like')

the other sharp and brittle things i am reading in this suddenly cold of cold winters is john berger 'pig earth'--stories and poems from 4 years of living with his family in an alpine peasant village in france-- stories that get at the wisp/heart of oral history, in the shapeshiftng of steam and hearth fire against the country dark. blood is close in these stories, the struggles of animal life and human dependence on these animals for food and warmth. the things i like best are descriptions of the wind at night.....

i have also just devoured the first part of anne carson's 'glass, irony, and god'. looking out at a cold country english moor from warm kitchen.. the sharp edge of love loss.....holes in the earth caked with ice, spiralling downward.

i think it is time for hayden carruth's 'longer poems', maybe some seamus heaney (irish sea salt floured frozen earth). i am in the mood for lists, for obscure strung collections of specific things, plants, bits of flower or stone. i am warm in my brooklyn apartment room, warm from sherry and hard strung chains of words, clicked bone, and shell.

i want to write about leaf mold, moldering, in piles during the wintertime. i want to write about rainbow puddles of dark oil under a van on a dark silver night street. i want to write about mountain winter, and breath, and other powdered things. i want to write about metallic things that are cold, that shine dully, with burnished grey light. i want to write about powdered breath, and moors.

i am warm, but surrounded by strange things. i need simplicity, i am warm, cedar, sherry, sea salt, coastal, and springtime cold. i am winter frost, smoke from the stacks, and heat hum. i am calm st the center of it all, and grateful for the outlines of these things pressed against the soft contours of my body.

i am cold, and quiet, and hopeful, annoyed, and hunched. i am ready for the specificity of my own life, i will remember the details of each plant i see-- yesterday sam and i walked around roosevelt island. i couldn't take my eyes from the tree trunks along the water-- warm copper colored almost violet burnished trunks-- ribbons thick around their base, strung and corded around themselves, but shiny metal underneath the brushstrokes of thin tree fiber. I loved that color, against the cold grey of the city and the dark water... this copper was alight from within, smudged in just the right places, and tarnished just enough to show a soft glow, to throw this burnished glow on us as we walked below. the seagulls fell off of their stoops one by one as we walked by.