Amy Clampitt

 

In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985 


The strange and wonderful are too much with us. 
The protea of the antipodes—a great, 
globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom— 
for sale in the supermarket! We are in 
our decadence, we are not entitled. 
What have we done to deserve 
all the produce of the tropics—

this fiery trove, the largesse of it 
heaped up like cannonballs, these pineapples, bossed 
and crested, standing like troops at attention, 
these tiers, these balconies of green, festoons 
grown sumptuous with stoop labor? 

The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us 
before there is a yen or a need for it. The green- 
grocers, uptown and down, are from South Korea. 
Orchids, opulence by the pailful, just slightly

fatigued by the plane trip from Hawaii, are 
disposed on the sidewalks; alstroemerias, freesias 
fattened a bit in translation from overseas; gladioli 
likewise estranged from their piercing ancestral crimson; 
as well as, less altered from the original blue cornflower 
of the roadsides and railway embankments of Europe, these 
bachelor's buttons. But it isn't the railway embankments 
their featherweight wheels of cobalt remind me of, it's 

a row of them among prim colonnades of cosmos, 
snapdragon, nasturtium, bloodsilk red poppies, 
in my grandmother's garden: a prairie childhood, 
the grassland shorn, overlaid with a grid, 

Nothing Stays Put

unsealed, furrowed, harrowed and sown with immigrant grasses, 
their massive corduroy, their wavering feltings embroidered 
here and there by the scarlet shoulder patch of cannas 
on a courthouse lawn, by a love knot, a cross stitch 
of living matter, sown and tended by women, 
nurturers everywhere of the strange and wonderful, 
beneath whose hands what had been alien begins, 
as it alters, to grow as though it were indigenous. 

But at this remove what I think of as 
strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan 
on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom, 
a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above— 
is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift 
of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood. 
Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel. 
All that we know, that we're 
made of, is motion.