'The Exotic is Everywhere'

A pink violet is growing in the front yard, not planted by us but likely the offspring of a seed carried by the wind. For a native Northerner, its existence, including the color, is unlikely and utterly un-Christmas-like, though it brings to mind candy. When I sent a friend in Schenectady, N.Y., a photo of the flower she wrote: “That’s amazing. I’m jealous.” She’s already tired of this season’s snowfall. 

I happened to be reading Amy Clampitt, whose poems can sometimes be a little too rich for my blood but in “Nothing Stays Put” she writes: “The strange and wonderful are too much with us.” Her observation works on several levels. If we accept that wonder is our inheritance, we start to experience it everywhere: a violet growing outdoors five days before Christmas? On a more mundane level, the world has been thoroughly globalized. Anything might be anywhere. My youngest son, a Peace Corps volunteer, bought a bag of Doritos in Caraz, a town in West Central Peru with a population of some 14,000. Clampitt writes: “The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us / before there is a yen or a need for it.” And this, at the poem’s conclusion:

 

“Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.

All that we know, that we’re

made of, is motion.”