Amy Clampitt Poems

While you walk the water's edge,
turning over concepts
I can't envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
...

A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands' spruce-tips
...

Tufts, follicles, grubstake
biennial rosettes, a low-
life beach-blond scruff of
couch grass: notwithstanding
...

past parentage or gender
beyond sung vocables
the slipped-between
the so infinitesimal
...

An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lines and shaped like a teacup.
...

cold nights on the farm, a sock-shod
stove-warmed flatiron slid under
the covers, mornings a damascene-
sealed bizarrerie of fernwork
...

Late in the day the fog
wrung itself out like a sponge
in glades of rain,
sieving the half-invisible
...

In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985


The strange and wonderful are too much with us.
...

a stone at dawn
cold water in the basin
these walls' rough plaster
imageless
...

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,
...