Syrinx by Amy,Amy Clampitt was born in Iowa in 1920 and grew up, in her twilight years, to become one of the most respected American poets of her era. Brought up in a Quaker farming community, she originally went to Grinnell College before getting the qualifications to head for Columbia University. Although she always wanted to be a writer, it wasn’t until the publication of her collection The Kingfisher, when she was in her sixties, that she got the recognition that she deserved.
Syrinx by Amy Clampitt
Like the foghorn that’s all lung,
the wind chime that’s all percussion,
like the wind itself, that’s merely air
in a terrible fret, without so much
as a finger to articulate
what ails it, the aeolian
syrinx, that reed
in the throat of a bird,
when it comes to the shaping of
what we call consonants, is
too imprecise for consensus
about what it even seems to
be saying: is it o-ka-lee
or con-ka-ree, is it really jug jug,
is it cuckoo for that matter?—
much less whether a bird’s call
means anything in
particular, or at all.
Syntax comes last, there can be
no doubt of it: came last,
can be thought of (is
thought of by some) as a
higher form of expression:
is, in extremity, first to
be jettisoned: as the diva
onstage, all soaring
pectoral breathwork,
takes off, pure vowel
breaking free of the dry,
the merely fricative
husk of the particular, rises
past saying anything, any
more than the wind in
the trees, waves breaking,
or Homer’s gibbering
Thespesiae iache:
those last-chance vestiges
above the threshold, the all-
but dispossessed of breath.
