AFFIRMATION (II)

(a) Between Pater and Pantheism. Mark Doty walks on the sunny side of Pater's still impressive, pathos-and-beauty-ridden sense of reality. Where Pater emphasized the elemental forces ceaselessly “parting on their ways,” undoing us, Doty accentuates the ensemble [in My Alexandria]. Life is not a thing of darkness; there are riches for the tasting, the taking, the telling. Consider “the unlikely needlepoint” that wild asters make of an October slope. Life is an obvious good. “It's enough to name the instances.” “Couldn't we live forever / without running out of occasions?” Nothing is a poverty: “Anything lived into long enough / becomes an orchard.” “Even the most circumstantial things / are holy in themselves.” We can make earthly angels of ourselves—make “the rain / part of the angel.” Yes, we will die, but first “what matters” will have proved to “be enough. Or more than that.” (All quotations are from “The Wings.”)

At the end of the century that confirmed psychological abysses and bombed up a global atmosphere of disaster, even such modest affirmations have become wagers. Doty's seem a sort of class embroidery, remote from the Third World. Yet the best hope remains the testimony of some of the survivors of atrocity: the reaffirmation of the simple blessing of sunshine, work, and community that Terrence des Pres summarized in his book The Survivor, and Doty is not far from this testimony. Not far at all.

Certainly “The Wings” has authority compared to the romantic apologetics of “Tiara,” an earlier poem of Doty's reprinted in Poets for Life. “Tiara” recounts that tension breaks at a funeral when someone says of the dead man, referring to the closed casket, he's “in there in a big wig / and heels,” but returns when someone else says “he asked for it”:

Asked for it—when all he did
was go down into the salt tide
of wanting as much as he wanted,
giving himself over so drunk
or stoned it almost didn't matter who,
though they were beautiful,
stampeding into him in the simple,
ravishing music of their hurry.

“What could he do, / what could any of us ever do / but ask for it,” the poet punningly asks at the end, braving the fact that the past tense of the second “could” betrays caution and that the question isn't really rhetorical even if it seals itself off by omitting the question mark. The poem is egregious in its go-for-broke erotic romanticism. Such lines as “the simple [!] / ravishing music [!] of their hurry” and “dreaming and waking men lie / on the grass while wet blue horses [!] / roam among them, huge fragments [!] / of the music we die into [!] / in the body's paradise” are more wide-eyed than sensual, more purple than blue.

In a later poem on a transvestite, “Esta Noche,” placed in the first part of My Alexandria, Doty applauds the stage-lit black-silk-draped “la fabulosa Lola” (“a man / you wouldn't look twice at in street clothes, / two hundred pounds of hard living, the gap in her smile / sadly narrative”):

                                                                      Tonight, she says,
put it on. The costume is license
          and calling. She says you could wear the whole
                         damn
          black sky and all its spangles. It's the only night
       we have to stand on. Put it on,
                    it's the only thing we have to wear.

Apart from confusing what you stand on with what you can put on, the lines reduce nature to so much black stuff best used to adorn the “sad” human form. They support a sentimental vanity, at best. (Merrill celebrates a “fabulous” getup in these AIDS days with more Paterian finesse in The Inner Room.) But as a seer, Doty has proven commendably ad hoc, experimental, if within a narrow, noncontradictory range. “The Wings” is evidence of this; and two strong poems near the end of My Alexandria, “Night Ferry” and “Becoming a Meadow,” also provide wiser perspectives than do “Esta Noche” and “Tiara.”

In “Night Ferry,” the self-admitted fiction of the world as a story (another pedal point in the book) first appears in a gorgeous image for reflected dock lights: “their colors / on the roughened surface combed / like the patterns of Italian bookpaper, / lustrous and promising. The narrative / of the ferry begins and ends brilliantly.” The end of the poem both takes up the figure again and pokes an air hole through its paper walls:

There's no beautiful binding
                              for this story, only the temporary,
liquid endpapers of the hurried water,
          shot with random color. But in the gliding forward's
a scent so quick and startling
          it might as well be blowing
off the stars. Now, just before we arrive,
          the wind carries a signal and a comfort,
lovely, though not really meant for us:
                              woodsmoke risen from the chilly shore.

We find here Doty's ever-present pulled-taffy tone and syntax (his voice's prison and its gift). But in this rhythmically beguiling poem we find, too, a caution before the temptations of narcissistic illusion, a lucid bargaining at the table of the little that life offers as comfort, which distinguishes it from “Esta Noche.”

If the virus is only implicit in “Night Ferry” (in an interview in the 1994 annual issue of Provincetown Art, Doty notes that being under so low-hanging a sword as AIDS intensifies the need to “love what is passing” and “to think about what it means to be temporary”), “Becoming a Meadow” pulls it out of the shadows: “I am thinking of my terror / of decay, the little hell opening in every violated cell, / the virus tearing / away—is it?” Really less a tearing away, as I understand it from Warner C. Greene's article “AIDS and the Immune System” in the September 1993 issue of Scientific American, than the virus' con-mannish entry into the cell, its subsequent confusion of the cell's identity by insinuating itself into the cell's chromosomal structure through a semiemulative, quick-change artistry in regard to its own constitution and consequent reduction of the cell to serving as the ground of its replication—a dizzying cycle of extraordinary complexity. (The virus itself has over 9,000 “bases” and more genes at its beck and call than other viruses have ever dreamed of.) The insidious complexity of the virus, not to mention what Greene calls its “rapid Darwinian evolution” (the result of the “error” it makes approximately once in every 2,000 incorporated nucleotides, leading to a constant generation of new variants of viral proteins), flies at a ripping angle from the large view of things that Doty creates in “Becoming a Meadow.” Here, and despite Doty's own description of a viral “tearing,” the world is a rhythmic whole of apparently harmonious comings and goings—the sweetest paganism. But Doty gives the idea considerable dignity, even so. Standing in a bookstore, “comforted” as usual “by the presence of stories,” he remembers a recent walk with his companion in Head of the Meadow by the “waves / endless rows of bold cursive,” and even as he thinks of his “terror of decays” he feels that “we are still a part of the meadow.” Indeed, the books around him are “like grasses,” the “whole place … / is one undulant, salt-swollen meadow of water” where waves swell again and again “like the baskets of bread / and fish in the story, the miracle baskets.” Not uncharacteristically, the elaboration of this conceit is, however elegantly, forced; and the miracle of a Creation renewed in each instant should probably be introduced as more than a simile (as it is, also via “baskets,” in a famous passage in Whitman's “Song of Myself”), or not at all—as it is, it feels slipped in and put over. In any case, the following vision, which brings Dante's terza rima down to all there is of an earthly paradise, or of any paradise, is perhaps as imaginative, surprising, unfeverish, freeing, and, withal, plausible an affirmation of things as they are as anyone has yet devised in these AIDS days:

a meadow accepts itself as various, allows
some parts of itself to always be going away,
because whatever happens in that blown,
ragged field of grass and sway
is the meadow, and threading the frost
of its unlikely brilliance yesterday
we also were the meadow