Sunday 6 January 2013

A Green Crab's Shell

 
by Mark Doty

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.



Mark Doty has written a wonderful poem called “A Green Crab’s Shell.” It’s about finding a crab shell and wondering at the beautiful shock of “Giotto blue” found within it — the color of the sky, carried by the crab all lifelong and yet invisible to all. It took the crab’s death, probably at the beak of some hungry seagull, to reveal this lovely, hidden color.  I like Doty's straightforward, almost stream-of-consciousness style - he shows stylistic tricks
in favor of saying what he has to say, but his Language is precise and exquisite for all that, and his poems thoughtful and Revealing. Today's is a good example - the crab shell is described in Beautiful detail, with an engaged subjectivity that reinforces its Comparison to a work of art, and the segue into a more personal musing feels perfectly Natural. And I love the ending, with its suggestion of an Escher an Worlds-within-worlds landscape - indeed, it was that image that made me Pick this poem out of a collection of Doty's works to run here.






At the Gym

 


This salt-stain spot
marks the place where men
lay down their heads,
back to the bench,

and hoist nothing
that need be lifted
but some burden they've chosen
this time: more reps,

more weight, the upward shove
of it leaving, collectively,
this sign of where we've been:
shroud-stain, negative

flashed onto the vinyl
where we push something
unyielding skyward,
gaining some power

at least over flesh,
which goads with desire,
and terrifies with frailty.
Who could say who's

added his heat to the nimbus
of our intent, here where
we make ourselves:
something difficult

lifted, pressed or curled,
Power over beauty,
power over power!
Though there's something more

tender, beneath our vanity,
our will to become objects
of desire: we sweat the mark
of our presence onto the cloth.

Here is some halo
the living made together.



In the poem “At the Gym” by Mark Doty we are given a visualization of a person at the gym about to lift weights. This poem has various different meanings. It’s a poem with a bit confusion about whom he wants to tell what .One thing that Doty is trying to say through this poem is that what impact we leave on society any why. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be remembered or leaving a legacy behind but it is what we are actually leaving that Doty is touching on. He used the word “stain” twice to describe what we have left and will leave, “stain”, a word commonly having a negative connotation to it. We want to leave an impression, but are only leaving behind stains. In the last two lines of the poem, Doty calls the stains “some halo the living made together” A halo, compared to stains, has a pretty positive connotation to it, as if we have reached sainthood. This is what we hope to reach, this is what we hope to leave behind, but it is that bench of false hope we rely on to do so. Doty is asking us to live a life worth living and do things that need to be done, then, and only then will you actually leave behind a legacy worth remembering, one with noble intent. In a very deep meaning the poet has tried telling giving a deeper meaning for what we human beings always want and try to do.

Saturday 5 January 2013


The Embrace

You weren't well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.

I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out—at work maybe?—
having a good day, almost energetic.

We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative

by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?

So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of you—warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.

Bless you. You came back so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.



The Embrace is what love symbolizes- the idea of loss not controlling you, but letting your love take control over your loss. This poem speaks of the gratitude of the surviving lover that he has a chance to say goodbye (albeit in a dream) to the person he loved without reliving the grief of his dying, seeing his partner as he was before the trauma and changes wrecked by illness. (Especially the stresses and wasting that tends to be wrought by AIDS.). I personally wonder if many people have had such a dream as this. The certainty that this was only a dream and yet the eagerness to participate it. To experience it and remember it all, to record it knowing this would be the only contact you might ever have with this loved one.The utter peace of leaning your head on the shoulder of the lost love, the familiar shoulder that you know in your mind is no longer of this earth. But in your heart it is as solid as it ever was. One last chance to experience the whole, entire person. The Embrace is one of the best poem written by mark Doty

Friday 4 January 2013


Culture and Social background

For a start, there were Doty's parents' almost yearly moves from one part of the country to another, common to so many corporate and military families of the era. Doty's father was an Army engineer who had to go where the work was, whether that meant building nuclear missile silos outside Tucson or rocket launching pads at Cape Canaveral.By the time Doty reached his teens, she had entered the ''long tornadic tunnel'' of alcoholism that would eventually kill her -- but not before she had inflicted some grave psychic damage on her son.Mark doty worked as a temporary office worker.After the death of his partner wally who tested HIV positive Mark Doty was in a shock and was the central event in Doty’s young life as both a person and poet. On its publication in 1987, Booklist praised the “quiet, intimate” Turtle, Swan for turning the gay experience into “an example of how we live, how we suffer and transcend suffering.”Through his different books Doty has often tried to say about the pain he suffered due to his identity. Doty’s status as detached observer to his own work was significantly complicated by his next volume, My Alexandria (1993), which won the National Poetry Series contest. Here, Doty confronts the pain of life as seen through the prism of AIDS. after Wally’s death, Doty found himself unable to write or even read. The solicitation of a poem by a friend who was editing an anthology led him to the writing, not of a poem, but of a book-length memoir, Heaven’s Coast (1996), in which he came to grips, in prose, with Wally’s life and death. “It was a real gift to be able to write it” at that troubled moment, Doty told Bing. A sense of loss pervades the volume, and death—in one form or another—is present in nearly every poem.  However, poems such as “Becoming a Meadow,” “Brilliance,” and “Fog,” in which Doty chronicles his and Roberts's fateful tests for HIV, Doty draws as much attention to the joys of life as the sadness of its parting.