The Kingfisher

The Kingfisher

by Amy Clampitt

In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud

they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming   

beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening   

of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed   

by those eye-spots' stunning tapestry, unsettled

the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening.

Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty-fifth Street   

found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical,   

acting the philistine, puncturing Stravinsky—"Tell   

me, what was that racket in the orchestra about?"—

hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite,   

a burnished, breathing wreck that didn't hurt at all.

Among the Bronx Zoo's exiled jungle fowl, they heard   

through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird   

reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered.   

When he mourned, "The poetry is gone," she quailed,   

seeing how his hands shook, sobered into feeling old.   

By midnight, yet another fifth would have been killed.

A Sunday morning, the November of their cataclysm   

(Dylan Thomas brought in in extremis to St. Vincent's,   

that same week, a symptomatic datum) found them   

wandering a downtown churchyard. Among its headstones,   

while from unruined choirs the noise of Christendom   

poured over Wall Street, a benison in vestments,

a late thrush paused, in transit from some grizzled   

spruce bog to the humid equatorial fireside: berry-

eyed, bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma   

in the stigmata of its underparts—or so, too bruised   

just then to have invented anything so fancy,

later, re-embroidering a retrospect, she had supposed.

In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then   

dead silence) later, she could not have said how many   

spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden,   

how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one   

insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down   

screaming in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery;

a kingfisher's burnished plunge, the color   

of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow   

through landscapes of untended memory: ardor   

illuminating with its terrifying currency

now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista

but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow.