Amy Clampitt - The Kingfisher lyrics

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 k**ed. 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.