a stone at dawn
cold water in the basin
these walls’ rough plaster
imageless
after the hammering
of so much insistence
on the need for naming
after the travesties
that passed as faces,
grace: the unction
of sheer nonexistence
upwelling in this
hyacinthine freshet
of the unnamed
the faceless
Amy Clampitt, (born June 15, 1920, New Providence, Iowa, U.S.—died Sept. 10, 1994, Lenox, Mass.), American modernist poet and prose author whose work won critical acclaim for its evocation of the natural world.