Atlantis

Rebound by Sagebrush

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? <

Turbulent stasis on a blue ground.

What is any art but static flame?

Fire of spun gold, grain.

This brilliant flickering's

arrested by named (Naples,

chrome, cadmium) and nameless

yellows, tawny golds. Look

at the ochre sprawl--how

they sprawl, these odalisques,

withering coronas

around the seedheads' intricate precision.

Even drying, the petals curling

into licks of fire,

they're haloed in the pure rush of light

yellow is. One theory of color,

before Newton broke the world

through the prism's planes

and nailed the primaries to the wheel,

posited that everything's made of yellow

and blue--coastal colors

which engender, in their coupling,

every other hue, so that the world's

an elaborated dialogue

between citron and Prussian blue.

They are a whole summer to themselves.

They are a nocturne

in argent and gold, and they burn

with the ferocity

of dying (which is to say, the luminosity

of what's living hardest). Is it a human soul

Continues...

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Excerpted from Atlantis by Mark Doty Copyright © 1995 by Mark Doty. Excerpted by permission.
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