Amy Clampitt

 

On the Disadvantages of Central Heating (English) cold nights on the farm, a sock-shod stove-warmed flatiron slid under the covers, mornings a damascene- sealed bizarrerie of fernwork         decades ago now waking in northwest London, tea brought up steaming, a Peak Frean biscuit alongside to be nibbled as blue gas leaps up singing         decades ago now damp sheets in Dorset, fog-hung habitat of bronchitis, of long hot soaks in the bathtub, of nothing quite drying out till next summer:         delicious to think of hassocks pulled in close, toasting- forks held to coal-glow, strong-minded small boys and big eager sheepdogs muscling in on bookish profundities         now quite forgotten the farmhouse long sold, old friends dead or lost track of, what’s salvaged is this vivid diminuendo, unfogged by mere affect, the perishing residue         of pure sensation