Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

(Amy Clampitt, for you) Casual. Flitting skin off cucumbers over a wide metal bowl, catcher for the harvest from the summer market, that cosmos of virtue — jug bands, frailed banjos, picked mandolins, tomatoes as a toddler sees them, mitts of stars — I feel a comet trail of shiver where my sternum is, that bone high-school posters flat out to a Roman sword, but dug up horrors prove as dropping bombs. I know it’s nothing serious, which worries. I’m known to be pulled along and flipped in fuguing wake. It’s good this happened at the sink, at evening, with time before the white flock orchestra descends the grass drifts through the shrub maze of picknickers and their pickneys on Tanglewood’s lawn. Shed bound! Music in hand and jaw muscles; the old estate spellcast as something sacral near Kripalu’s mount where stone hips cleave. I’ll be there in the back with maples oaks or birches, X-legged with Txakolina for as long as I can bear, cut jeans on the blue quilt gifted by a poet from Oaxaca to embrace my then small children when I wasn’t home and here I am not home again, months here in this cottage in this rumple-range terrain, summer homestead of phantasmal ease: Shakespeare by starlight, Martha Graham’s wraithings, mill blood museums, high-priced downward dogs, and all year, inns in mansions, British-eyed manors, valleys with asemic oratory patterned with what private cars elided from Manhattan — big gauge rail. Once, I swashed about a bend as if in winter on a sled, found origin: a high rock face bird-ferned, no kerb just bushing then road so thin my silver comet must have singed that low stone fence stacked with logic like dry wood, marker for the sheer fall to an olive river chilling twenty feet below, just lazy, just shiftless, not wanting to be Hudson or Mackenzie, Zambezi, Ob, Huang He, Purus or Nile, unambitious but with hint in watermark it often spites, cussing sotto voce like my petty Rio Grande does through what we scale-exempt Jamaicans call a gorge. Look good in the bushing — the bevel cut for rail. This flesh in its not-green greenness comets me in slow arc to a beach in Anguilla, a place rolled and sprinkled with hotels, empire’s latest quest. Cane nor cotton rooted here despite keratoconic oversight: Oh the whipped when healed have keloids, so the catting doesn’t work so well if those who love them don’t know braille. Bless fingerprints (we tell our food by skin). In this eel island’s shallows, the skin of recollection peels, everts leisure, flips the calendar of ease. Winter is Antillean frolic season. Here, August blisters quick-quick in air too damn sun-strong. The combers by the like-it’s-Eid-in-the-Sahara-by-religion-closed hotel obscene. My swim wake churns the clear-clear surf. To translucence it is spoiled. Who dreamed this, this shiver of villas, prompts of fins … this pastiche of lateen sails? Good stranding here. Alone. It feels ablative. Is there such a word? I’m shy to pare my clothes. Though I understand this multilingual archipelago as accident … tectonics, coral … science … moosh and voof; though I know plumb flight from here to my own island’s all-inclusive-cuffed north coast is 900 mash-mash miles, I feel indulgent, touristic, bathing naked here in Windsor Castle’s sea. Is it politics? Asemics? Ghost marks on my skin? There’s heat etch on my corneas as I drift purse eyed, slow turn in this gourd flesh tinted sea as cool as — each cliché is intaglio and there’s always room and need to shave — as cool as … as cool as, as cool as one can be while getting palmed by that translucence one rasps, is frilling longwise into waves collapsing in a wide bowl in the Berkshires, basin-filled hill province of the baronesque, of country folk and writers: Hawthorne, Wharton, Melville, Dubois. In this unremodeled kitchen cooked a modest poet of indecent skill, Clampitt who bloomed late and in profuse language, her labyrinths from this simple home breath-hitching as the gardens Beatrix Jones Farrand baroqued for Wharton at The Mount. For now and months to come I’m Berkshire too. I’m bass lake, escarpment stroll, bay horses grazing long necked, red barn on the rise; as well the grandfathered split-rail fence, facets glinting, the village with the lancing church, the felt common. I’m the hulled town streetpill-glumed; the plein air philharmonic, the market bounty-gemmed, the— did a fox skurch by my window or a cat? On a hike a black dog rushed me while its owners stayed off pace and I knew I’d kick it if it lunged and it did and I did not. A statement is a story, a salad of precisely mandolined ingredients, dressed up; and what if I were celeried, mustarded, mayonnaised? Things I do not like. At Tanglewood, mosquitoes will chorus, picknickers will gnat and I will camp on my alfombra, the story of me here saladed, tremble like a kite on sound’s current, belly in halfing light to galactic fireflies, the cosmos, way far up in the stuttering consolations, swoon, the shake at breastbone in the kitchen the work of self-yeast as much as sparked comet, a rise to infinite in gratitude, forgiveness, in terror, in faith, high as a cello in the red realm. Listz.