Souls on Ice
Souls on Ice
by Mark Doty
In the Stop 'n Shop in Orleans, Massachusetts, I was struck
by the elegance of the mackerel in the fresh-fish display. They were
rowed and stacked, brilliant against the white of the crushed ice; I
loved how black and glistening the bands of dark scales were, and
the prismed sheen of the patches between, and their shining flat eyes.
I stood and looked at them for a while, just paying attention while I
leaned on my cart--before I remembered where I was and realized
that I was standing in someone's way.
Our metaphors go on ahead of us, they know before we do.
And thank goodness for that, for if I were dependent on other ways
of coming to knowledge I think I'd be a very slow study. I need
something to serve as a container for emotion and idea, a vessel that
can hold what's too slippery or charged or difficult to touch. Will
doesn't have much to do with this; I can't choose what's going to
serve as a compelling image for me. But I've learned to trust that part
of my imagination that gropes forward, feeling its way toward what
it needs; to watch for the signs of fascination, the sense of compelled
attention (Look at me, something seems to say, closely) that
indicates that there's something I need to attend to. Sometimes it
seems to me as if metaphor were the advance guard of the mind;
something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us,
looking for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve.
Driving home from the grocery, I found myself thinking
again about the fish, and even scribbled some phrases on an envelope
in the car, something about stained glass, soapbubbles, while I was
driving. It wasn't long--that same day? the next?--before I was at my
desk, trying simply to describe what I had seen. I almost always
begin with description, as a way of focusing on that compelling
image, the poem's "given." I know that what I can see is just the
proverbial tip of the iceberg; if I do my work of study and
Mark Doty
examination, and if I am lucky, the image which I've been intrigued
by will become a metaphor, will yield depth and meaning, will lead
me to insight. The goal here is inquiry, the attempt to get at what it is
that's so interesting about what's struck me. Because it isn't just
beauty; the world is full of lovely things and that in itself wouldn't
compel me to write. There's something else, some gravity or charge
to this image that makes me need to investigate it.
Exploratory description, then; I'm a scientist trying to
measure and record what's seen. The first two sentences of the poem
attempt sheer observation, but by the second's list of tropes (abalone,
soapbubble skin, oil on a puddle) it's clear to me that these
descriptive terms aren't merely there to chronicle the physical reality
of the object. Like all descriptions, they reflect the psychic state of
the observer; they aren't "neutral," though they might pretend to be,
but instead suggest a point of view, a stance toward what is being
seen. In this case one of the things suggested by these tropes is
interchangeability; if you've seen one abalone shell or prismy
soapbubble or psychedelic puddle, you've seen them all.
And thus my image began to unfold for me, in the evidence
these terms provided, and I had a clue toward the focus my poem
would take. Another day, another time in my life, the mackerel might
have been metaphor for something else; they might have served as
the crux for an entirely different examination. But now I began to see
why they mattered for this poem; and the sentence that follows
commences the poem's investigative process:
Splendor, and splendor,
and not a one in any way
distinguished from the other
--nothing about them
of individuality.
1
Souls on Ice
There's a terrific kind of exhilaration for me at this point in
the unfolding of a poem, when a line of questioning has been
launched, and the work has moved from evocation to meditation. A
direction is coming clear, and it bears within it the energy that the
image contained for me in the first pace. Now, I think, we're getting
down to it. This élan carried me along through two more sentences,
one that considers the fish as replications of the ideal, Platonic
Mackerel, and one that likewise imagines them as the intricate
creations of an obsessively repetitive jeweler.
Of course my process of unfolding the poem wasn't quite
this neat. There were false starts, wrong turnings that I wound up
throwing out when they didn't seem to lead anywhere. I can't
remember now, because the poem has worked the charm of its craft
on my memory; it convinces me that it is an artifact of a process of
inquiry. The drama of the poem is its action of thinking through a
question. Mimicking a sequence of perceptions and meditation, it
tries to make us think that this feeling and thinking and knowing is
taking place even as the poem is being written. Which, in a way, it is
--just not this neatly or seamlessly! A poem is always a made version
of experience.
Also, needless to say, my poem was full of repetitions, weak
lines, unfinished phrases and extra descriptions, later trimmed, I like
to work on a computer, because I can type quickly, put everything in,
and still read the results later on, which isn't always true of my
handwriting. I did feel early on that the poem seemed to want to be a
short-lined one, I liked breaking the movement of these extended
sentences over the clipped line, and the spotlight-bright focus the
short line puts on individual terms felt right. "Iridescent, watery," for
instance, pleased me as a line-unit, as did this stanza:
prismatics: think abalone,
the wildly rainbowed
mirror of a soapbubble sphere,
Mark Doty
Short lines underline sonic textures, heightening tension. The
short a's of prismatics and abalone ring more firmly, as do the o's of
abalone, rainbowed and soapbubble. The rhyme of mirror and sphere
at beginning and end of line engages me, and I'm also pleased by the
way in which these short lines slow the poem down, parceling it out
as it were to the reader, with the frequent pauses introduced by the
stanza breaks between tercets adding lots of white space, a
meditative pacing.
And there, on the jeweler's bench, my poem seemed to come
to rest, though it was clear there was more to be done. Some further
pressure needed to be placed on the poem's material to force it to
yield its depths. I waited a while, I read it over. Again, in what I had
already written, the clues contained in image pushed the poem
forward.
Soul, heaven . . . The poem had already moved into the
realm of theology, but the question that arose ("Suppose we could
iridesce . . .") startled me nonetheless, because the notion of losing
oneself "entirely in the universe/ of shimmer" referred both to these
fish and to something quite other, something overwhelmingly close
to home. The poem was written some six months after my partner of
a dozen years had died of AIDS, and of course everything I wrote-everything I saw--was informed by that loss, by the overpowering
emotional force of it. Epidemic was the central fact of the
community in which I lived. Naively, I hadn't realized that my
mackerel were already of a piece with the work I'd been writing for
the previous couple of years--poems that wrestled, in one way or
another, with the notion of limit, with the line between being
someone and no one. What did it mean to be a self, when that self
would be lost? To praise the collectivity of the fish, their common
iden-tity as "flashing participants," is to make a sort of anti-elegy, to
suggest that what matters is perhaps not our individual selves but our
brief soldiering in the broad streaming school of humanity--which is
composed of us, yes, but also goes on without us.
2
Souls on Ice
The one of a kind, the singular, like my dear lover, cannot
last.
And yet the collective life, which is also us, shimmers on.
Once I realized the poem's subject-beneath-the-subject, the
final stanzas of the poem opened swiftly out from there. The
collective momentum of the fish is such that even death doesn't seem
to still rob its forward movement; the singularity of each fish more or
less doesn't really exist, it's "all for all," like the Three Musketeers. I
could not have considered these ideas "nakedly," without the vehicle
of mackerel to help me think about human identity. Nor, I think,
could I have addressed these things without a certain playfulness of
tone, which appeared first in the archness of "oily fabulation" and the
neologism of "iridesce." It's the blessed permission distance gives
that allows me to speak of such things at all; a little comedy can also
help to hold terrific anxiety at bay. Thus the "rainbowed school/ and
its acres of brilliant classrooms" is a joke, but one that's already
collapsing on itself, since what is taught there--the limits of "me"--is
our hardest lesson. No verb is singular because it is the school that
acts, or the tribe, the group, the species; or every verb is singular
because the only I there is is a we.
The poem held one more surprise for me, which was the
final statement--it came as a bit of a shock, actually, and when I'd
written it I knew I was done. It's a formulation of the theory that the
poem has been moving toward all along: that our glory is not our
individuality (much as we long for the Romantic self and its private
golden heights) but our commonness. I do not like this idea. I would
rather be one fish, sparkling in my own pond, but experience does
not bear this out. And so I have tried to convince myself, here, that
beauty lies in the whole and that therefore death, the loss of the part,
is not so bad--is in, fact, almost nothing. What does our individual
disappearance mean--or our love, or our desire--when, as the
Marvelettes put it, "There's too many fish in the sea . . . ?"
Mark Doty
I find this consoling, strangely, and maybe that's the best
way to think of this poem--an attempt at cheering oneself up about
the mystery of being both an individual and part of a group, an
attempt on the part of the speaker in the poem (me) to convince
himself that losing individuality, slipping into the life of the world,
could be a good thing. All attempts to console ourselves, I believe,
are doomed, because the world is more complicated than we are. Our
explanations will fail, but it is our human work to make them. And
my beautiful fish, limited though they may be as parable, do help
me; they are an image I return to in order to remember, in the face of
individual erasures, the burgeoning, good, common life. Even after
my work of inquiry, my metaphor may still know more than I do; the
bright eyes of those fish gleam on, in memory, brighter than what
I've made of them.
A Display of Mackerel
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
3
Souls on Ice
Mark Doty
distinguished from the other
--nothing about them
of individuality. Instead
just as, presumably,
they didn't care that they were living:
all, all for all,
they're all exact expressions
of one soul,
each a perfect fulfillment
the rainbowed school
and its acres of brilliant classrooms,
in which no verb is singular,
of heaven's template,
mackerel essence. As if,
after a lifetime arriving
or every one is. How happy they seem,
even on ice, to be together, selfless,
which is the price of gleaming.
at this enameling, the jeweler's
made uncountable examples,
each as intricate
in its oily fabulation
as the one before.
Suppose we could iridesce,
From Introspections: Contemporary American Poets on One
of Their Own Poems, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini,
published by Middlebury College Press. Copyright © 1997 by Mark
Doty. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
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,
4