Mark Doty

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so. Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue of any thrillingly dead thing. And you? Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk, thinking of what you never can bring back, or else you’re off in some fog concerning —tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work: to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving, my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark, a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here, entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

They lie in parallel rows, on ice, head to tail, each a foot of luminosity barred with black bands, which divide the scales’ radiant sections like seams of lead in a Tiffany window. Iridescent, watery prismatics: think abalone, the wildly rainbowed mirror of a soapbubble sphere, think sun on gasoline. Splendor, and splendor, and not a one in any way distinguished from the other —nothing about them of individuality. Instead they’re all exact expressions of the one soul, each a perfect fulfilment of heaven’s template, mackerel essence. As if, after a lifetime arriving at this enameling, the jeweler’s made uncountable examples, each as intricate in its oily fabulation as the one before Suppose we could iridesce, like these, and lose ourselves entirely in the universe of shimmer—would you want to be yourself only, unduplicatable, doomed to be lost? They’d prefer, plainly, to be flashing participants, multitudinous. Even now they seem to be bolting forward, heedless of stasis. They don’t care they’re dead and nearly frozen, just as, presumably, they didn’t care that they were living: all, all for all, the rainbowed school and its acres of brilliant classrooms, in which no verb is singular, or every one is. How happy they seem, even on ice, to be together, selfless, which is the price of gleaming.

The jellyfish float in the bay shallows like schools of clouds, a dozen identical — is it right to call them creatures, these elaborate sacks of nothing? All they seem is shape, and shifting, and though a whole troop of undulant cousins go about their business within a single wave's span, every one does something unlike: this one a balloon open on both ends but swollen to its full expanse, this one a breathing heart, this a pulsing flower. This one a rolled condom, or a plastic purse swallowing itself, that one a Tiffany shade, this a troubled parasol. This submarine opera's all subterfuge and disguise, its plot a fabulous tangle of hiding and recognition: nothing but trope, nothing but something forming itself into figures then refiguring, sheer ectoplasm recognizable only as the stuff of metaphor. What can words do but link what we know to what we don't, and so form a shape? Which shrinks or swells, configures or collapses, blooms even as it is described into some unlikely marine chiffon: a gown for Isadora? Nothing but style. What binds one shape to another also sets them apart — but what's lovelier than the shapeshifting transparence of like and as: clear, undulant words? We look at alien grace, unfettered by any determined form, and we say: balloon, flower, heart, condom, opera, lampshade, parasol, ballet. Hear how the mouth, so full of longing for the world, changes its shape?

When the beautiful young man drowned— accidentally, swimming at dawn in a current too swift for him, or obedient to some cult of total immersion that promised the bather would come up divine, mortality rinsed from him— Hadrian placed his image everywhere, a marble Antinoüs staring across the public squares where a few dogs always scuffled, planted in every squalid little crossroads at the furthest corners of the Empire. What do we want in any body but the world? And if the lover’s inimitable form was nowhere, then he would find it everywhere, though the boy became simply more dead as the sculptors embodied him. Wherever Hadrian might travel, the beloved figure would be there first: the turn of his shoulders, the exact marble nipples, the drowned face not really lost to the Nile—which has no appetite, merely takes in anything without judgment or expectation— but lost into its own multiplication, an artifice rubbed with oils and acid so that the skin might shine. Which of these did I love? Here is his hair, here his hair again. Here the chiseled liquid waist I hold because I cannot hold it. If only one of you

Between the bridge and the river he falls through a huge portion of night; it is not as if falling is something new. Over and over he slipped into the gulf between what he knew and how he was known. What others wanted opened like an abyss: the laughing stock-clerks at the grocery, women at the luncheonette amused by his gestures. What could he do, live with one hand tied behind his back? So he began to fall into the star-faced section of night between the trestle and the water because he could not meet a little town’s demands, and his earrings shone and his wrists were as limp as they were. I imagine he took the insults in and made of them a place to live; we learn to use the names because they are there, familiar furniture:faggot was the bed he slept in, hard and white, but simple somehow, queer something sharp but finally useful, a tool, all the jokes a chair, stiff-backed to keep the spine straight, a table, a lamp. And because he’s fallen for twenty-three years, despite whatever awkwardness his flailing arms and legs assume he is beautiful and like any good diver has only an edge of fear he transforms into grace. Or else he is not afraid, and in this way climbs back up the ladder of his fall, out of the river into the arms of the three teenage boys who hurled him from the edge— really boys now, afraid, their fathers’ cars shivering behind them, headlights on—and tells them it’s all right, that he knows they didn’t believe him when he said he couldn’t swim, and blesses his killers in the way that only the dead can afford to forgive.

Grateful for their tour of the pharmacy, the first-grade class has drawn these pictures, each self-portrait taped to the window-glass, faces wide to the street, round and available, with parallel lines for hair. I like this one best: Brian, whose attenuated name fills a quarter of the frame, stretched beside impossible legs descending from the ball of his torso, two long arms springing from that same central sphere. He breathes here, on his page. It isn’t craft that makes this figure come alive; Brian draws just balls and lines, in wobbly crayon strokes. Why do some marks seem to thrill with life, possess a portion of the nervous energy in their maker’s hand? That big curve of a smile reaches nearly to the rim of his face; he holds a towering ice cream, brown spheres teetering on their cone, a soda fountain gift half the length of him —as if it were the flag of his own country held high by the unadorned black line of his arm. Such naked support for so much delight! Artless boy, he’s found a system of beauty: he shows us pleasure and what pleasure resists. The ice cream is delicious. He’s frail beside his relentless standard.

Wrapped in gold foil, in the search and shouting of Easter Sunday, it was the ball of the princess, it was Pharoah’s body sleeping in its golden case. At the foot of the picket fence, in grass lank with the morning rain, it was a Sunday school prize, silver for second place, gold for the triumphant little dome of Ararat, and my sister took me by the hand and led me out onto the wide, wet lawn and showed me to bend into the thick nests of grass, into the darkest green. Later I had to give it back, in exchange for a prize, though I would rather have kept the egg. What might have coiled inside it? Crocuses tight on their clock-springs, a bird who’d sing himself into an angel in the highest reaches of the garden, the morning’s flaming arrow? Any small thing can save you. Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me.