School of the Arts

Mark Doty

• Éditeur: HarperCollins e-books
• Année: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061877766
• Sujet: Literatur
• Sous-sujet: Amerikanische Poesie

The darkly graceful poems in Mark Doty's seventh collection explore the ways in which we are educated by the implacable powers of time and desire. The world constantly renews itself, and the new brings both possibility and erasure. Given the limits of our own bodies, how are we to live within the inevitability of despair?

This is the plainest of Doty's books, its language stripped and humbled. But whatever depths are sounded in these poems, their humane and open music sustains. Art itself instructs us. Lucian Freud's startling renditions of human skin, Virginia Woolf's ecstatic depiction of consciousness, Caravaggio's only-too-real people elevated to difficult glory -- all turn the light of human intelligence upon "the night of time."

Formally inventive, warm, at once witty and disconsolate, School of the Arts represents a poet reinventing his own voice at midlife, finding a way through a troubled passage. Acutely attentive, insistently alive, this is a book of "fierce vulnerability."

The Vault

And Craving said,
…Why do you lie, since you belong to me?

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

1. The Bootblack

What can be said of this happiness?

The bootblack boy on his knees

in the dim of the bar gives himself

completely to the work of polishing,

leaning into the body on the stool

before him, a shirtless and eager man

who’s being mouthed clean.

Around them parts the human dark.

Not much to do with degradation;

the generous bootblack pours

his attention out of his body

—all alertness—into the presence

before him, up the legs, beautiful,

burying his face in the warm cloth

of the lap: completed, receptacle,

recipient, held, filled—

Though it’s hardly passive:

he’s working to relinquish,

giving the seated one pleasure,

releasing his own weight.

They seem to light the gloom

of their corner; together

they make one lamp. And as if

his work were not complete

until it had been seen by another

—labor of the mouth,

art perfected with the tongue—

he turns his face up toward me,

his witness, smiling, though the verb’s

thin for this unshielded triumph

of a face: What’s he conquered?

Distance and dissatisfaction have slipped

from the look he lifts to me,

so that his power might not go

unacknowledged, now that

he is the image of achieved joy.

2. Double Embrace

Skin to the back of me,

skin to the fore,

and I’m the center

of a double embrace,

or perhaps that’s not

the precise term,

since no one’s

face to face; we are

three shirtless men

become one

tentative whole,

the thick arms behind me

pressing against my arms,

then reaching forward

to the arms before me,

drawing us tighter together,

heat and slow

uprush of it; no hurry,

the embrace rocking

a bit, a bit of motion

to bind three disparate

bodies into—Look what we can make!

Six arms snaking,

so that the darkened barroom

recedes, and the mirrors,

the pendant lanterns and bluish

video haze. Then the firm hands

kneading my shoulders, hands

over my heart, my hands

on the shoulders in front of me,

those arms reached back toward

the original arms, as though

we were the chain of generation,

each man proceeding from the one

before, and each also reaching

backward, into the body

which had borne him—

The bar’s a cave of minor

miracle played out—

it’s not sex I want, if what sex is

is coming; more than that,

search and pleasure, reading,

divining signals, shift of attention,

flare in my direction, pose,

tattooed arms gleaming, hips

cocked in their particular invitation.

Particular! We’re almost generalized

here, local avatars

of a broader principle,

we are just now representative men

doing the men’s work

—fierce vulnerability—

open and containing, open

and held, the forward momentum

ceased, swaying a little, a...