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.”
2 comments:
I'd give a lot for a little Christmas weather; for weeks it's been in the mid-80's here in Southern California. We're supposed to get some rain on Christmas Eve, so I'll have to be satisfied with that.
I'm with your friend in Schenectady, as the cold in Chicago has banished the flowers. Poetry, however, is a solace during the dark afternoons,
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