Dancers Exercising

By Amy Clampitt 1920–1994 Amy Clampitt

Frame within frame, the evolving conversation

is dancelike, as though two could play

at improvising snowflakes’

six-feather-vaned evanescence,

no two ever alike. All process

and no arrival: the happier we are,

the less there is for memory to take hold of,

or—memory being so largely a predilection

for the exceptional—come to a halt

in front of. But finding, one evening

on a street not quite familiar,

inside a gated

November-sodden garden, a building

of uncertain provenance,

peering into whose vestibule we were

arrested—a frame within a frame,

a lozenge of impeccable clarity—

by the reflection, no, not

of our two selves, but of

dancers exercising in a mirror,

at the center

of that clarity, what we saw

was not stillness

but movement: the perfection

of memory consisting, it would seem,

in the never-to-be-completed.

We saw them mirroring themselves,

never guessing the vestibule

that defined them, frame within frame,

contained two other mirrors.

Source: The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)

Biography

Upon publication of her book of poems The Kingfisher in 1983, Amy Clampitt became one of the most highly regarded poets in America. Born in rural Iowa and raised on a farm, she studied first at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and later at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York City. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Clampitt held a variety of jobs and attempted unsuccessfully to write novels, . . .

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