Doty - School of the arts : poems

Helen says heaven, for her, would be complete immersion in physical process, without self-consciousness to be the respiration of the grass, or ionized agitation just above the break of a wave, traffic in a sunflowers thousand golden rooms. Images of exchange, and of untrammeled nature. But if were to become part of it all, wont our paradise also involve participation in being, say, diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks on August pavement, weird glow of service areas along the interstate at night? Well be shiny pink egg cartons, and the thick treads of burst tires along the highways in Pennsylvania: a hell weve made to accompany the given: we will join our tiresome productions, things that want to be useless forever. But thats me talking. Helen would take the greatest pleasure in being a scrap of paper, if thats what there were to experience. Perhaps thats why shes a painter, finally: to practice disappearing into her scrupulous attention, an exacting rehearsal for the larger world of things it wont be easy to love.

Helen I think will master it, though I may not. She has practiced a long time learning to see. I have devoted myself to affirmation, when I should have kept my eyes on the ground.

dartan idea arcs the cold, then a clutch of related thoughts; slim branches dont even flicker with the weight of whats landed; animate alphabet whizzing past our faces, a black and white hurry, as if a form of notation accompanied our walk, a little ahead of us and a bit behind. If we could see their trajectory, if their trace remained in the winter air, what a tunnel theyd figure: skein of quick vectors above our heads, a fierce braid, improvised, their decisions the way one makes poetry from syntaxunpredictable, resolving to wild regularity (thought has to flit to describe it, speech has to try that hurry). A scaffolding, a kind of argument about being numerous.

Thread and rethreadalight. Study. We might be carrying crumbs. Were not. I wish. Their small heads cock, they lift (no visible effort, as if flight were the work of the will only), light, a bit further along, and though theyre silent it seems you could hear the minute repeating registers of their attention, *, *, the here you are yes here you yes.

Pronoun reference unclear. Who looks at us an aerial association of a dozen subjectivities, or a singular self wearing, this snowy afternoon, twelve pair of wings? Collectivity of sparks, sparking collectivity? Say live resides not inside feathers or skin but in the whizzing medium. No third person. Sharp, clear globe of January, and wethe fourteen of us the thinking taking place. We is instances of alertness, grammar help me.

For his birthday, I gave Stanley a hyacinth bean, an annual, so he wouldnt have to wait for the flowers.

For his birthday, I gave Stanley a hyacinth bean, an annual, so he wouldnt have to wait for the flowers.

He said, Mark, I have just the place for it! as if hed spent ninety-eight years anticipating the arrival of this particular vine. I thought poetry a brace against time, the hours held up for study in a voices cool saline, but his allegiance is not to permanent forms. His gardens all furious change, budding and rot and then the coming up again; why prefer any single part of the round? I dont know that hed change a word of it; I think he could be forever pleased to participate in motion. Something opens. He writes it down. Heaven steadies and concentrates near the lavender.

Hes already there.

Blackboard covered with a dust of living chalk, live chaos-cloud wormed by turbulence: the rod glides and the vet narrates shadows I cant quite force into shape: His kidneys mightthe spleen appears I cant see what he sees, and so resort to simile: cloudbank, galaxy blurred with slow comings and goings, that far away. The doctor makes appreciative noises, to encourage me; he praises Beaus stillness. I stroke the slope beneath those open, abstracted eyes, patient, willing to endure whatever we deem necessary, while the vet runs along the shaved blonde blue-veined, gleaming with gelled alcohol to allow sound to penetrate more preciselya kind of wand, pointing a stream of waves nothing we could hear to translate the dark inside his ribs onto this midnight screen. The magic pen slides, the unseens made well, far from plain. No chartable harmony, less anatomy than a storm of pinpoints subtler than stars.

Where does a bark upspool from the quick, a baritone swell past the sounding chambers? You cant see that, or the clock built into the wellspring, or that fixed place from which a long regarding of us rises. It wasnt cancer, wasnt clear, we didnt see, really, anything. Hes having trouble keeping up his weight; his old appetites flag, though on the damp morning trails hes the same golden hurry. Today Im herding the two old dogs into the back of the car, after the early walk, wet woods: Beaus generous attention must be brought into focus, gaze pointed to the tailgate so hell be ready to leap, and Arden, arthritic in his hind legs, needs me to lift first his forepaws and then, placing my hands under his haunches, hoist the moist black bulk of him into the wagon, and he growls a little before he turns to face me, glad to have been lifted And as I go to praise them, as I like to do, the words that come from my mouth, from nowhere, are Times children, as though that were the dearest thing a person could say. Why did I call them by that name? They race this quick parabola faster than we do, as though it were a run in the best of woods, run in their dreams, paws twitching even asleep theyre hurrying.

Big blocks of ice clear cornerstones chug down a turning belt toward the blades of a wicked, spinning fan; scraping din of a thousand skates and then powder flies out in a roaring firehose spray of diamond dust, and the film crew obscures the well-used Manhattan snow with a replica of snow.

Big blocks of ice clear cornerstones chug down a turning belt toward the blades of a wicked, spinning fan; scraping din of a thousand skates and then powder flies out in a roaring firehose spray of diamond dust, and the film crew obscures the well-used Manhattan snow with a replica of snow.

Trailers along the edge of the Square, arc lamps, the tangled cables of a technical art, and our parks a version of itself. We walk here daily, the old dogs and I glad for the open rectangle of air held in its frame of towers, their heads held still and high to catch the dog runs rich, acidic atmosphere, whitened faces theirs and minelifted toward gray branches veining the variable sky. Today were stopped at the rim: one guys assigned the task of protecting the pristine field a woman will traverse after countless details are worried into placeat a careful angle, headed toward West Fourth. Theyre filming The Hours , Michaels novel, a sort of refraction of Mrs. Dalloway . Both books transpire on a single June day; thats the verb; these books do breathe an air all attention, as if their substance were a gaze entirely open to experience, eager to knowThey believe the deepest pleasure is seeing and saying how we see, even when were floored by springs sharp grief, or a steady approaching wave of darkness.

In the movie version, its winter; theyre aiming for a holiday release, and so must hasten onward. Someone calls out Background ! and hired New Yorkers begin to pass behind the perfect field, a bit self-conscious, skaters and shoppers too slow to convince, so they try it again, Clarissa passing the sandblasted arch bound in its ring of chain-link, monument glowing gray against the gray. A little less now in the world to love. Taxi on Bleecker, dim afternoon, after a bright ones passing, after the hours in stations and trains, blur of the meadows through dull windows, fitful sleep, heading home, and now the darkness inside the cab deeper than anything a winter afternoon could tender. Nothing stays, the self has no power over time, were stuck in a clot of traffic, then this: a florist shop, where something else stood yesterday, what was it? Do things give way that fast? PARADISE FLOWERS, arced in gold on the window glass, racks and rows of blooms, and an odd openness on the sidewalk, andlook, the telltale script of cables inking the street, trailers near, and Martian lamps, and a lone figure in a khaki coat poised with a clutch of blooms while they check her aspect through the lens: Clarissa, of course, buying the flowers herself. I take it personally.