By night a laddered diagram
seen from the windows of this
bedroom town-rayflowcrs of dread
ascending and descending-
identifies the cooling tower,
insomniac vision
revealed by day as a grayed
obese archangel, its twiddled
dirk of ash and rhinestone
a metronomic rerun of some
half obliterated last
nightmare of Eden
in the West: O Abendland, O
astral monochrome, steam-plume
whose throttled howl deploys
above the cooling tower
a pillared, effortless
volume of milkweed.
The air is windless. Harmless
outside the moat and continent of
power, the tabernacled rods’
implosive marrow, an aureole
of bright particulars let fall
falls unregarded,
such an excess as to be all but
sorrowless: the sumac’s roadside
flares, used-car lots bannered as
for a gala, street maples’ tattered
circus-tent extravaganza
sifting unnumbered
relics, emblems of the everywhere
expendable: O Abendland, astral
insomniac, prophetic hulk of the
unuttered: by whom, should your
hot hour arrive, will all the dreams
of Adam be remembered?
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.