A Hairline Fracture poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry

Whatever went wrong, that week, was more than weather:

a shoddy streak in the fabric of the air of London

that disintegrated into pollen

and came charging down by the bushelful,

an abrasive the color of gold dust, eroding

the tearducts and littering the sidewalks

in the neighborhood of Sloane Square,

where the Underground’s upper reaches have the character,

almost, of a Roman ruin-from one

crannied arcade a dustmop of yellow blossom

hung with the stubborn insolence of the unintended,

shaking still other mischief from its hair

onto the platform, the pneumatic haste of missed

trains, the closing barrier-

wherever we went, between fits of sneezing we quarreled:

under the pallid entablatures of Belgravia,

the busy brown façades that were all angles

going in and out like a bellows, even the small house

on Ebury Street where Mozart, at the age of eight,

wrote his first symphony, our difference

was not to be composed.

Unmollified by the freckled plush of mushrooming

monkeyflowers in the windowboxes of Chelsea, undone

by the miraculous rift in the look of things

when you’ve just arrived-the remote up close,

the knowing that in another, unentered existence

everything shimmering at the surface is this minute

merely, unremarkably familiar-

it was as though we watched the hairline fracture

of the quotidian widen to a geomorphic fissure,

its canyon edge bridged by the rainbows of a terror

that nothing would ever again be right

between us, that wherever we went, nowhere

in the universe would the bone again be knit

or the rift be closed.