NOCTURNE IN BLACK AND GOLD
Shadow is the queen of colors.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Tonight the harbor's
one lustrous wall, the air a warm gray
-mourning dove, moleskin, gabardine-
blurring the bay's black unguent.
And, gradually, a few light patches
-boats, ghosts of lamps
where the pier ends?
The memory of lamps?
In Whistler's "Nocturnes"
you can barely see
the objects of perception,
or rather there are no solids,
only fields of shimmer,
fitful integers of gleam,
traces of a rocket's shatter,
light troubling a shiver of light.
Fogged channels, a phantom glow
on the face of this harbor,
midway between form and void,
without edges, hypnagogic.
Listen, I carry myself
like a cigarette lighter
wrapped between hands in the dark
and so feel at home in the huge
indefinition of fog, the same
sort of billowing I am: charcoal, black on black,
matte on velveteen, a hurrying sheen
on gleaming docks. Keats: If a sparrow
come before my Window
I take part in its existence
and pick about the Gravel.
If we're only volatile essence,
permeable, leaking out,
pouring into any vessel bright enough
to lure us, why be afraid?
having been a thousand things,
why not be endless?
Act II, Die Zauberflöte:
the Queen of the Night
ascends her lunar glissando,
soprano cascading upward
until you'd swear
this isn't a voice at all;
she's become an instrument,
an instant's pure
erasure, essence slipped
into this florid scatter:
rhinestones shivering
on a tray lacquered black
with coldest ozone. Königin,
Königin der Nacht:
chill shine, icy traces . . .
Here, at wharf's end,
the trawlers' winking candles
all undone, phantom girandoles
nearly extinguished
by the cool salve
of fog. Haven't we wanted,
all along, to try on boundlessness,
like mutable, starry clothes?
Isn't it a pleasure,
finally, to be vaporous,
to be cloudy flares
like these blurred lamps,
ready to shift or disperse
or thin to a glaze of atmosphere,
sheer, rarefied, without limit?
Königin der Nacht: that dizzying pour
in a voice becoming no one's,
one empty glove
brushing the evening's cold cheek
like the clear exhalation
of a star. Against the firmament's
gleaming patent,
the Queen's voice
no longer even human:
a gilt thread raveling
in the dark. How lucky,
vanishing, to become that,
at once evanescent
and indelible. Love,
little pilot flame, flickering,
listen: I've been no one
so many times I'm not the least afraid.
Doesn't everything rush
to be something else?
Won't it be like this,
where you're going: shore and bay,
harbor and heaven one continuum
sans coast or margins?
No one's here,
or hardly anyone, and how strangely
free and fine it is
to be laved and extended, furthered
in darkness, while shadows
give way to other shadows,
and the bay murmurs
its claim: You're a rippling,
that quick, and you long to be
loose as air again, unfettered
freshness, atmosphere
and aria, an aspect of fog,
manifest, and then dissolving,
which you could regret
no more than fog.
A brave candling theory
I'm making for you,
little lamplight, believe,
and ripple out free
as shimmer is. Go.
Don't go. Go.
Mark Doty, Atlantis. HarperCollins, NY 1995. Pp. 94-98.
Mark Doty was born about 1941. Some biographical information.