Global Unobtrusive

...with the johnny-jump-ups I stopped to look at,

last week, in a plot by the sidewalk: weedily prolific

common garden perennial whose lineage goes back to

the bi- or tri-colored native field pansy of Europe:

ancestor of the cloned ocher and aubergine, the cream-white,

the masked motley, the immaculate lilac-blue of the pansies

that thrive in the tended winter plots of tidewater Virginia,

where in spring the cutover fields at the timber’s edge,

away from the boxwood and magnolia alleys, are populous

with an indigenous, white, just faintly suffused-with-violet

first cousin: a link with what, among the hollows of the

great dunes of Holland, out of reach of the slide and hurl

of the North Sea breakers, I found growing a summer ago—a

field pansy tinged not violet but pink, sometimes approaching

the hue of the bell of a foxglove: a gathering, a proliferation

on a scale that, for all its unobtrusiveness, seems to be

worldwide, of what I don’t know how to read except as an

urge to give pleasure: a scale that may, for all our fazed

dubiety, indeed be universal. I know I’m leaving something out

when I write of this omnipresence of something like eagerness,

this gushing insouciance that appears at the same time capable

of an all but infinite particularity: sedulous, patient, though

in the end (so far as anyone can see) without consequence.

What is consequence? What difference to the minutiae

of that seeming inconsequence that’s called beauty

add up to?...

 

The Field Pansy

Amy Clampitt

1920-1994

 

Done