Poets And Poetry Of New England
Mark Doty: Selected Poems from Atlantis
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Description
My salt marsh
-mine, I call it, because
these day-hammered fields
of dazzled horizontals
undulate, summers,
inside me and out-
how can I say what it is?
Sea lavender shivers
over the tidewater steel.
A million minnows ally
with their million shadows
(lucky we'll never need
to know whose is whose).
The bud of storm loosens:
watered paint poured
dark blue onto the edge
of the page. Haloed grasses,
gilt shadow-edged body of dune…
I could go on like this.
I love the language
of the day's ten thousand aspects,
the creases and flecks
in the map, these
brilliant gouaches.
But I'm not so sure it's true,
what I was taught, that through
the particular's the way
to the universal:
what I need to tell is
swell and curve, shift
and blur of boundary,
tremble and spilling over,
a heady purity distilled
from detail. A metaphor, then:
in this tourist town,
the retail legions purvey
the far-flung world's
bangles: brilliance of Nepal
and Mozambique, any place
where cheap labor braids
or burnishes or hammers
found stuff into jewelry's
lush grammar,
a whole vocabulary
of ornament: copper and lacquer,
shells and seeds from backwaters
with fragrant names, millefiori
milled into African beads, Mexican abalone,
camelbone and tin, cinnabar
And verdigris, silver,
black onyx, coral,
gold: one vast conjugation
of the verb
To shine.
And that
is the marsh essence---
all the hoarded riches
of the world held
and rivering, a gleam
awakened and doubled
by water flashing
off the bowing of the grass.
Jewelry, tides, language:
things that shine.
what is description, after all
but encoded desire?
And if we say
the marsh, if we forge
terms for it, then isn't it
contained in us,
a little,
the brightness?
"Long Point Light"
Long Point's apparitional
this warm spring morning,
the strand a blur of sand light
and the square white
of the lighthouse-separated from us
the bay's ultramarine
as if it were nowhere
we could ever go--gleams
like a tower's ghost, hazing
into the rinsed blue of March,
our last outpost in the huge
indetermination of sea.
It seems cheerful enough,
in the strengthening sunlight,
fixed point accompanying our walk
along the shore. Sometimes I think
it's the where-we-will be,
only not yet, like some visible outcropping
of the afterlife. In the dark
its deeper invitations emerge:
green witness at night's end,
flickering margin of horizon,
marker of safety and limit,
but limitless, the way it calls us,
and where it seems to want us
to come, and so I invite it
into the poem, to speak,
and the lighthouse says:
Here is the world you asked for,
gorgeous and opportune,
here is nine o'clock, harbor-wide,
and a glinting code: promise and warning.
The morning's the size of heaven.
What will you do with it?
Faith
I've been having these
awful dreams, each a little different,
though the core's the same
we're walking in a field,
Wally and Arden and I, a stretch of grass
with a highway running beside it,
or a path in the woods that opens
onto a road. Everything's fine,
then the dog sprints ahead of us,
excited; we're calling but
he's racing down a scent and doesn't hear us,
and that's when he goes
onto the highway. I don't want to describe it.
Sometimes it's brutal and over,
and others he's struck and takes off
so we don't know where he is
or how bad. This wakes me
every night, and I stay awake;
I'm afraid if I sleep I'll go back
into the dream. It's been six months,
almost exactly, since the doctor wrote
not even a real word
but an acronym, a vacant
four-letter cipher
that draws meaning into itself,
reconstitutes the world.
We tried to say it was just
a word; we tried to admit
it had power and thus to nullify it
by means of our acknowledgement.
I know the current wisdom:
Bright hope, the power of wishing you're well.
He's just so tired, though nothing
shows in any tests, Nothing,
the doctor says, detectable:
The doctor doesn't hear what I do,
that trickling, steadily rising nothing
that makes him sleep all day,
vanish into fever's tranced afternoons,
and I swear sometimes
when I put my head to his chest
I can hear the virus humming
like a refrigerator.
Which is what makes me think
you can take your positive attitude
and go straight to hell.
We don't have a future,
we have a dog.
Who is he?
Soul without speech,
sheer, tireless faith,
he is that-which-goes-forward,
black muzzle, black paws
scouting what's ahead;
he is where we'll be hit first,
he's the part of us
that's going to get it.
I'm hardly awake on our morning walk
-always just me and Arden now-
and sometimes I am still
in the thrall of the dream,
which is why when he took a step onto Commercial
before I'd looked both ways,
I screamed his name and grabbed his collar.
And there I was on my knees,
both arms around his neck
and nothing coming.
And when I looked into that bewildered face
I realized I didn't know what it was
I was shouting at,
I didn't know who I was trying to protect.
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