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    Sweet Machine: Poems by
    Sweet Machine: Poems by
    Sweet Machine: Poems by
    Ebook115 pages45 minutes

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061755026
    Sweet Machine: Poems by
    Author

    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,

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