Archaic Figure by Amy Clampitt
After being directed by a reader to another online collection of best-loved poems, I was delighted to find this one by Amy Clampitt. I’ve never read any of her books of poetry, but I’ve always been impressed when I’ve read her work in anthologies.
Archaic Figure
By Amy Clampitt
Headless in East Berlin, no goddess
but a named mere girl (Ornithe, “Little Bird”)
out of the rubble, six centuries underneath
the plinth of what we quaintly call
Our Time, informs the foaming underside
of linden boulevards in bloom, sweet hide
laid open onto—sterile as an operating table,
past the closed incision of the Wall—
the treeless reach of Alexanderplatz,
paved counterpart of the interior flatland,
halfway across the globe, we’d left behind:
projection, factor, yield, the quantifiable
latitude; malls, runways, blacktop; tressed
cornsilk and alfalfa, drawn milk of the humdrum
nurture there were those of us who ran away from
toward another, earlier, bonier
one, another middle of the earth, yearned-for stepmotherland of
Holderlin and Goethe:
sunlight and grief, the cypress and the
crucifix, the vivid poverty
of terraced slopes, of bread, wine, olives,
fig and pomegranate shade we stumbled into,
strolling the sad northern drizzle, in
the uprooted Turks’ quasi-bazaar,
as here, among uprooted artifacts, we’ve come
upon this shape’s just-lifted pleats, her
chitoned stillness the cold chrism of a time
that saw—or so to us it seems—
with unexpected clarity to the black core
of what we are, of everything we were to be,
have since become. Who stands there headless.
Barbar, she would have called us all.
Thanks for posting this! I find it quite evocative.
I like the way she has the headless statue transport us first to (East, still divided) Berlin, then back in time and over in place to ancient Greece — itself an imagined homeland of the German Romantic poets. All the while the blank flatness of the German city square connects visually with the rural flatness of the speaker - now revealed to be an American tourist confronted by several sorts of distance - temporal, cultural, geographic.