"Description"
by
Mark Doty
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 can 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 rishes
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?
(from Atlantis, 1995)
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