Sweet Machine: Poems by
By Mark Doty
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About this ebook
Mark Doty's last two award-winning collections of poetry, as well as his acclaimed memoir Heaven's Coast, used the devastation of AIDS as a lens through which to consider questions of loss, love and identity. The poems in Sweet Machine see the world from a new, hard-won perspective: A coming back to life, after so much death, a way of seeing the body's "sweet machine" not simply as a time bomb, but also as a vibrant, sensual, living thing.
These poems are themselves "sweet machines"—lyrical, exuberant and joyous—and they mark yet another milestone in the extraordinary career of one of our most distinguished and accomplished poets.
Mark Doty
Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with numerous distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2008, he won the National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. He is a professor at the University of Houston, and he lives in New York City.
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Book preview
Sweet Machine - Mark Doty
FAVRILE
Glassmakers,
at century’s 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,
and—what?
What to make of Favrile,
Tiffany’s 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 world’s
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 coloratura—Jimmy 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.
It’s too much,
to be expected to believe;
art’s a mercuried sheen
in which we may discern,
because it is surface,
clear or vague
suggestions of our depths.
Don’t we need a word
for the luster
of things which insist
on the fact they’re made,
which announce
their maker’s bravura?
Favrile, I’d 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 sonnet’s
blown-glass sateen,
for bel canto,
for Fabergé.
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.
WHITE KIMONO
Sleeves of oyster, smoke and pearl,
linings patterned with chrysanthemum flurries,
rippled fields: the import store’s
received a shipment of old robes,
cleaned but neither pressed nor sorted,
and the owner’s cut the bindings
so the bales of crumpled silks
swell and breathe. It’s raining out, off-season,
nearly everything closed,
so Lynda and I spend an hour
overcome by wrinkly luxuries we’d 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
midsummer’s 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,