Mark Doty - Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems

His music, Charles writes, makes us avoidable. I write: emissary of evening. Were writing poems about last nights bat. Charles has stripped the scene to lyric, while Im filling in the tale: how, when we emerged from the inn, an unassuming place in the countryside near Hoarwithy, not far from the Wye, two twilight mares in a thorn-hedged field across the roadclotted cream and raw gray wool, vaguely above it all came a little closer. Though when we approached they ignored us and went on softly tearing up audible mouthfuls, so we turned in the other direction, toward Lough Pool, a mudhole scattered with sticks beneath an ancient conifers vast trunk. Then Charles saw the quick ambassador fret the spaces between boughs with an inky signature too fast to trace.

We turned our faces upward, trying to read the deepening blue between black limbs. And he said again, There he is! Though it seemed only one of us could see the fluttering pipistrelle at a timeyoud turn your head to where hed been, no luck, hed already joined a larger dark. There he is! Paul said it, then Pippa. Then I caught the fleeting contraption speeding into a bank of leaves, and heard the high, two-syllabled piping. But when I said what Id heard, no one else had noticed it, and Charles said, Only some people can hear their frequencies. Fifty years old and I didnt know I could hear the tender cry of a bat cry wont do: a diminutive chime somewhere between merriment and weeping, who could ever say? I with no music to my name save what I can coax into a line, no sense of pitch, heard the nights own one-sided conversation.

What to make of the gift? An oddity, like being double-jointed, or token of some kinship to the little Victorian handbag dashing between the dim bulks of trees? Of course the next day we begin our poems. Charles considers the pipistrelles music navigational, a modest, rational understanding of what I have decided is my personal visitation. Is it because I am an American I think the bat came especially to address me, who have the particular gift of hearing him? If he sang to us, but only I heard him, does that mean he sang to me? Or does that mean I am a son of Whitman, while Charles is an heir of Wordsworth, albeit thankfully a more concise one? Is this material necessary or helpful to my poem, even though Charles admires my welter of detail, my branching questions? Couldnt I compose a lean, meditative evocation of what threaded over our wondering heads, or do I need to do what I am doing now, and worry my little aerial friend with a freight not precisely his? Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience? Shh, says the evening near the Wye. Enough, say the hungry horses. Listen to my poem, says Charles.

White cotton cap, immaculate shoes and stockings, black coat over starched dress, she performs her work, holds the book open in front of her, looks down through thick-rimmed glasses, glances up swiftly so as not to lift her eyes long from the task, covertly taking stock of who takes stock of her, spine of the holy text in her left hand, dark right forefinger tapping a random or necessary passage, how has she chosen it? I would say she beats out a jeremiad, cannot or will not speak and so this iteration is her form of witnesssave that in her insistence she strikes with the hard tap of her fingernail, over and over, wearing the ink away until the thin paper tears, lower half of the pages tatted, as if mice had been shredding the blessings and prohibitions for a nest, no choice but to point to or punish the book or both, tearing away at the damned loved word that is everything to her and does not deliver her and therefore she must go on wounding the book in public: her art, displayed for us, unvarying, in the station at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue, on a bitter night just after the turn of the year.

A kind of heaven, this clamor, a lulliloo : to shout joyously, to welcome with cries, from a cry of joy among some African peoples: Websters New International, 1934, a foot-thick volume deftly marbled as this patch of marsh.

A kind of heaven, this clamor, a lulliloo : to shout joyously, to welcome with cries, from a cry of joy among some African peoples: Websters New International, 1934, a foot-thick volume deftly marbled as this patch of marsh.

Today I require the term and there it isthese definitions wait to be lived, actual as these frogs, who chorus as if theres no tomorrow, or else theyve all the time in the world. We ruin the rain, they go right on, this year. Hard to imagine the eagerness of a body which pours itself into this forms you have to take on faith, since all they seem to be is chiming Morse belling out long-short over the patched tarmac of the runway. I never till now needed the word lulliloo. How do you reckon your little music?

The old words are dying, everyone forgets them, pages falling into sleep and dust, dust and sleep, burning so slowly you wouldnt even know theres a fire. Or thats what I think half the time.

Then, at the bookstore, a young man reciting, slight for fourteen, blond, without irony but not self-important either; his loping East Texas vowels threaten to escape the fence of pentameter, his voice seems to have just arrived here, but the old cadence inhabits anyway. He makes the poem his own even as he becomes a vessel for its reluctance to disappear. All right, maybe they perish, but the boy has the look of someone repeating a crucial instruction that must be delivered, word for word, as he has learned it: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.

I have joined a student theater group, an insurrection in the motherly gray capital battered by invasion and occupation exhausted somnolence, dreary romance. In the piece were mounting, a demonstration in the central square, I play the role of the Angel of Prague, and must climb the faade of an ancient church fronting the square, and stand behind the statue of a female figure, a near-forgotten saint, where I am to unfurl a pair of large fabric wings, in my dream, my blue wing upon which is written, IT MUST BE BEAUTIFUL, and my red wing which reads IT MUST BE NEW.

The light turns and Im stepping onto the wide and empty crosswalk on Eighth Avenue, nothing between the white lines but a blowing riffle of paper when this truck all unnecessary red gleamroars onto the avenue from 20th, the driver turns his wheels inches from my knees even though I jump back out of the way, and before Ive even thought Im yelling what are you doing, act like a citizen though its clear from the face already blurred past me hes enjoying this, and I shout Asshole and kick at the place where his tire was with my boot.

The light turns and Im stepping onto the wide and empty crosswalk on Eighth Avenue, nothing between the white lines but a blowing riffle of paper when this truck all unnecessary red gleamroars onto the avenue from 20th, the driver turns his wheels inches from my knees even though I jump back out of the way, and before Ive even thought Im yelling what are you doing, act like a citizen though its clear from the face already blurred past me hes enjoying this, and I shout Asshole and kick at the place where his tire was with my boot.

If I carried a sharp instrument I could scrape a long howl on his flaming paint job (just under the gold and looming logo: DEMOLITION) and what kind of citizen does this thought make me, quivering and flummoxed by contradictory impulses: to give a speech on empathy or fling my double latte across his back windshield, though who knows what he might do then. Hes stuck in traffic and pretends Im not watching him looking in my direction, and people passing doubtless think who is this idiot fulminating to himself, or probably they dont; theyve got trouble of their own. Heres a story: two pilgrim monks arrive at a riverbank where an old ladys weeping, no way to cross, and though theyve renounced all traffic with women, one man hoists her on his shoulders and ferries her over the water. Later his friend is troubled: How could you touch her when you vowed not to? And the first monk says, I put her down on the other side of the river, why are you still carrying her? Middays so raw and dirty I cant imagine anyone heres pleased with something just now, and Im carrying the devil in his carbon chariot all the way to 23rd, down into the subway, roiling against the impersonal malice of the truck that armors him so he doesnt have to know anyone. Under the Port Authority I understand Im raging because thats easier than weeping, not because Im so afraid of scraping my skull on the pavement but because hes made me erasable, a slip of a self, subject to. Howd I get emptied till I can be hostaged by a dope in a flaming climate-wrecker? I try to think who made him so powerless he craves dominion over strangers, but you know what? I dont care.