personal favorites / poetry collections… The Kingfisher by Amy Clampitt / poem & video

Amy Clampitt

The Kingfisher

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Link to an interview, The Paris Review: Amy Clampitt, The Art of Poetry No. 45

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“Berceuse”

Listen to Gieseking playing a Berceuse
of Chopin—the mothwing flutter
light as ash, perishable as burnt paper—

and sleep, now that the furnaces of Auschwitz
are all out, and tourists go there.
The purest art has slept with turpitude,

we all pay taxes. Sleep. The day of waking
waits, cloned from the phoenix—
a thousand replicas in upright silos,

nurseries of the ultimate enterprise.
Decay will undo what it can, the rotten
fabric of our repose connives with doomsday.

Sleep on, scathed felicity. Sleep, rare
and perishable relic. Imagining’s no shutter
against the absolute, incorrigible sunrise.

 
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Walter Gieseking plays Chopin Berceuse Op. 57 (1938-1956)

~ by samofthetenthousandthings on April 28, 2012.