A Green Crab's Shell -- Mark Doty

(Poem #1838) A Green Crab's Shell Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like-- though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws' gesture of menace and power. A gull's gobbled the center, leaving this chamber --size of a demitasse-- open to reveal a shocking, Giotto blue. Though it smells of seaweed and ruin, this little traveling case comes with such lavish lining! Imagine breathing surrounded by the brilliant rinse of summer's firmament. What color is the underside of skin? Not so bad, to die, if we could be opened into this-- if the smallest chambers of ourselves, similarly, revealed some sky. -- Mark Doty

I like Doty's straightforward, almost stream-of-consciousness style - he
eschews stylistic tricks in favour of saying what he has to say, but his
language is precise and exquisite for all that, and his poems thoughtful and
revealing. Today's is a good example - the crab shell is described in
beautiful detail, with an engaged subjectivity that reinforces its
comparison to a work of art (note, also, the whole life-imitating-art
inversion), and the segue into a more personal musing feels perfectly
natural.

And I love the ending, with its suggestion of an Escherian
worlds-within-worlds landscape - indeed, it was that image that made me
pick this poem out of a collection of Doty's works to run here.

martin

[Links]

We've run one of Doty's poems before, the exquisite Broadway [Poem #1175]:
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1175.html

Biography:
  http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Mark-Doty

Wikipedia entry:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Doty

Broadway -- Mark Doty

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1175) Broadway Under Grand Central's tattered vault --maybe half a dozen electric stars still lit-- one saxophone blew, and a sheer black scrim billowed over some minor constellation under repair. Then, on Broadway, red wings in a storefront tableau, lustrous, the live macaws preening, beaks opening and closing like those animated knives that unfold all night in jewelers' windows. For sale, glass eyes turned outward toward the rain, the birds lined up like the endless flowers and cheap gems, the makeshift tables of secondhand magazines and shoes the hawkers eye while they shelter in the doorways of banks. So many pockets and paper cups and hands reeled over the weight of that glittered pavement, and at 103rd a woman reached to me across the wet roof of a stranger's car and said, I'm Carlotta, I'm hungry. She was only asking for change, so I don't know why I took her hand. The rooftops were glowing above us, enormous, crystalline, a second city lit from within. That night a man on the downtown local stood up and said, My name is Ezekiel, I am a poet, and my poem this evening is called fall. He stood up straight to recite, a child reminded of his posture by the gravity of his text, his hands hidden in the pockets of his coat. Love is protected, he said, the way leaves are packed in snow, the rubies of fall. God is protecting the jewel of love for us. He didn't ask for anything, but I gave him all the change left in my pocket, and the man beside me, impulsive, moved, gave Ezekiel his watch. It wasn't an expensive watch, I don't even know if it worked, but the poet started, then walked away as if so much good fortune must be hurried away from, before anyone realizes it's a mistake. Carlotta, her stocking cap glazed like feathers in the rain, under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts, must have wondered at my impulse to touch her, which was like touching myself, the way your own hand feels when you hold it because you want to feel contained. She said, You get home safe now, you hear? In the same way Ezekiel turned back to the benevolent stranger. I will write a poem for you tomorrow, he said. The poem I will write will go like this: Our ancestors are replenishing the jewel of love for us. -- Mark Doty

(From My Alexandria, published by University of Illinois Press.)

My Alexandria (1993), was chosen by Philip Levine for the National
Poetry Series. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and
Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize, and was also a National Book Award finalist.

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I, by happenstance, came upon this volume of poems in which Doty explores
landscape in poetry. This poem is one such piece. I have never been to New
York, but the setting can be any city of the world. The woman who asks for
money and the poet by the name Ezekiel, can be people we have met somewhere
sometime. And most important this poem reminds us how the "impulse to
touch her" is one way (and perhaps the only way) to "feel contained".

Sashi

[Martin adds]

I *have* been to New York. The poem is perfect.

Links:

Biography:
  [broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C0F07

We did a "Songs of the City" theme a while ago:
  [broken link] http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/collections/44.html