Mark Doty - Sweet Machine

Glassmakers, at centurys end, compounded metallic lusters in reference to natural sheens (dragonfly and beetle wings, marbled light on kerosene) and invented names as coolly lustrous as their products scarab-gleam: Quetzal , Aurene, Favrile . Suggesting, respectively, the glaze of feathers, that sun-shot fog of which halos are composed, andwhat? What to make of Favrile , Tiffanys term
for his coppery-rose flushed with gold like the alchemized atmosphere of sunbeams in a Flemish room? Faux Moorish, fake Japanese, his lamps illumine chiefly themselves, copying waterlilies bronzy stems, wisteria or trout scales; surfaces burnished like a tidal stream on which an excitation of minnows boils and blooms, artifice made to show us the lavish wardrobe of things, the worlds glaze of appearances worked into the thin and gleaming stuff of craft. A story:
at the puppet opera where one man animated the entire cast while another ghosted the voices, basso to coloraturaJimmy wept at the world of tiny gestures, forgot, he said, these were puppets, forgot these wire and plaster fabrications were actors at all, since their pretense allowed the passions released to be well, operatic. Its too much, to be expected to believe; arts a mercuried sheen in which we may discern, because it is surface, clear or vague suggestions of our depths. Dont we need a word
for the luster of things which insist on the fact theyre made, which announce their makers bravura? Favrile , Id propose, for the perfect lamp, too dim and strange to help us read. For the kimono woven, dipped in dyes, unraveled and loomed again that the pattern might take on a subtler shading.

For the sonnets blown-glass sateen, for bel canto, for Faberg. For everything which begins in limit (where else might our work begin?) and ends in grace, or at least extravagance. For the silk sleeves
of the puppet queen, held at a ravishing angle over her puppet lover slain, for her lush vowels mouthed by the plain man hunched behind the stage.

Sleeves of oyster, smoke and pearl, linings patterned with chrysanthemum flurries, rippled fields: the import stores received a shipment of old robes, cleaned but neither pressed nor sorted, and the owners cut the bindings so the bales of crumpled silks swell and breathe. Its raining out, off-season, nearly everything closed, so Lynda and I spend an hour overcome by wrinkly luxuries wed never wear, even if we could: clouds of are they plum blossoms? billowing on mauve, thunderheads of pine mounting a stony slope, tousled fields of embroidery in twenty shades of jade: costumes for some Japanese midsummers eve. And there, against the back wall, a garment which seems itself an artifact of dream: tiny gossamer sleeves like moth wings worrying a midnight lamp, translucent silk so delicate it might shatter at the weight of a breath or glance.

The mere idea of a robe, a slip of a thing (even a small shoulder might rip it apart) which seems to tremble a little, in the humid air. The owner enjoying our pleasure, this slow afternoon, in the lush tumble of his wares gives us a deal. A struggle, to narrow it to three: deep blue for Lynda, lined with a secretive orange splendor of flowers; a long scholarly gray for me, severe, slightly pearly, meditative; a rough raw silk for Wally, its slubbed green the color of day-old grass wet against lawn-mower blades. Home, we iron till the kitchen steams, revealing drape and luster. Wally comes out and sits with us, too,
though hes already tired all the time, and the three of us fog up the rainy windows, talking, ironing, imagining mulberry acres spun to this unlikely filament nearly animate stuffand the endless labor of unwinding the cocoons. What strength and subtlety in these hues.

Doesnt rain make a memory more intimate? Were pleased with our own calm privacy, our part in the work of restoration, that kitchens achieved, common warmth, the time-out-of-time sheen of happiness to it, unmistakable as the surface of those silks. And all the while that fluttering spirit of a kimono hung in the shop like a lunar token, something the ghost of a moth might have worn, stirring on its hanger whenever the door was openedpetal, phantom, little milky flame lifting like a curtain in the wind which even Lynda, slight as she was, did not dare to try on.

flung to your salt parameters in all that wide gleam unbounded edgeless in that brilliant intersection where we poured the shattered grit the salt and distillation of you which blew back into my face stinging like a kiss from the other world a whole year youve languished blue in ceaseless wind naked now in all lights and chill swaddlings of cloud never for a moment cold you are uninterruptible seamless as if all this time youd been sleeping in the sparkle and beckon of it are you in the pour of it as if there were a secret shining room in the house and youd merely gone there we used to swim summers remember naked in those shoals now I think was I ever that easy in this life fireworks remember Handel an orchestra
on a barge in the harbor and fountains spun to darkness flung in time to the music scrawling heaven like sperm like chrysanthemums bursting in an enormous hurry all fire and chatter flintspark and dazzle and utterly gone save here in the scribble of winter sunlight on sheer mercury when I was a child some green Fourth flares fretting the blue-black night a twirling bit of ash fell in my open eye and for a while I couldnt see those skyrockets is it like that now love some cinder blocking my sight so that I cant see you who are only for an hour asleep and dreaming in this blue and light-shot room as if I could lean across this shifting watery bed and ask are you awake 2. EVERYWHERE I thought Id lost you. But you said Im imbued in the fabric of things, the way that wax lost from batik shapes the pattern where the dye wont take . I make the space around you , and so allow you shape.

And always youll feel the traces of that wax soaked far into the weave : the air around your gestures , the silence after you speak . Thats me, that slight wind between your hand and what youre reaching for ; chair and paper, book or cup : that close, where I am: between where breath ends, air starts . 3. VAN GOGH , Flowering Rosebushes : 1889 A billow of attention enters the undulant green, and so configures it to an unbroken rhythm, summers continuous surface, dappled and unhurried though subject to excitations, little swarms of shifting strokes which organize themselves into shadow and leaf, white starbursts of bloom: a calm frenzy of roses. His Junes one green unbordered sea, and hes gone into it entirelynothing here but the confident stipple and accumulation of fresh and certain gesture, new again in a rush of arrival. Dont you want to be wrapped, brocaded, nothing to interrupt the whole struck field in the various and singular complexity of its music? To be of a piece with the world, whole cloth? These little passages accrue, differ, bursts of white roses, ripples and striations; whats Van Gogh but a point of view? Missing from the frame, hes everywhere, though it would be wrong to think him at the center of the scene: his bodys gone, like yours.

Rather its as if this incandescent stuff a wildly mottled Persian scarf whose summery pattern
encapsulates shoreline and garden, Junes jade balconies of wave and blossom tiered, one above the other, in terraces of bloom were wrapped around him, some splendid light-soaked silk, weightless, motile, endlessly figured and refiguring: gone into the paint, dear, gone entirely into ( white rose & leaf, starry grasses ) these waves of arriving roses, the tumbling rose of each arriving wave.