I went to the park, where, as I admired the muted, earthy tones of the late November landscape, I thought about an article I read about Amy Clampitt, a poet who was born in 1920 and didn’t publish her first work until 1983. One critic called her ‘one of the Patron Saints of Late Bloomers.’
She spent much of her life moving between office jobs and writing novels and poems that were never published.
She also had what was described as a ‘conversion experience’ at the Cloisters, which led her to join the Episcopal Church and to start writing poetry instead of prose, although she later left the church and returned to prose (but then went back to poetry). Life, the article noted, is rarely linear.
I wondered if Clampitt was moved by one of the medieval tapestries depicting the unicorn hunt.
Or maybe she had the experience while strolling through the nearby heather gardens, where she was mesmerized by the red tones of a fallen oakleaf hydrangea leaf.
However, she probably wasn’t playing with the settings on her new iPhone camera when she wrote about ‘the unction/of sheer nonexistence.’
But she might have been looking at the wilting asters as they prepared to sink back into the ground.
