From ‘The Prairie’, by Amy Clampitt

To be landless, half a nomad, nowhere wholly

at home, is to discover, now, an epic theme

in going back. The rootless urge that took

my father’s father to Dakota, to California,

impels me there. A settled continent: what

does it mean? I think of nights, half wakeful,

under the roof of their last house, the haven

I knew it as long gone, whoever lives there,

its streetlit solitudes, the clock’s tock,

the wooing snuffle of a freight train traveling

along a right of way whose dislodged sleepers now

lie scattered like the bones of mastodons.

I think of Dakota, the wind-raked shelterbelts,

the silos’ hived anxiety, the trembling

B-52s. I think of Pasadena: date palms,

hibiscus, pepper trees, the feckless charm

found mainly in the habitat of earthquakes:

half-kempt, aging bungalows gone bridal

under a flowery surfeiting of vines: the desert

fanned, sprinkled, seductive from its bath

of purloined rainbows. North Raymond

not quite a slum; a niggling tenderness

for the outmoded thrives on the scandal

of ways lost, of names gone under. No one

I know or ever heard of lives there now.

On Summit, from some long-obliterated

snapshot, I thought I recognized the house

a great-aunt lived in once: the number

not quite right, the tenant an old

deaf Mexican who did not understand.

From “The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt” by Amy Clampitt (Alfred A. Knopf: 478 pp., $30) Copyright 1997 Reprinted by permission.