Visitation by Mark Doty

Visitation

by Mark Doty

When I heard he had entered the harbor,

and circled the wharf for days,

I expected the worst: shallow water,

confusion, some accident to bring

the young humpback to grief.

Don't they depend on a compass

lodged in the salt-flooded folds

of the brain, some delicate

musical mechanism to navigate

their true course? How many ways,

in our century's late iron hours,

might we have led him to disaster?

That, in those days, was how

I'd come to see the world:

dark upon dark, any sense

of spirit an embattled flame

sparked against wind-driven rain

till pain snuffed it out. I thought,

This is what experience gives us,

and I moved carefully through my life

while I waited. . . Enough,

it wasn't that way at all. The whale

—exuberant, proud maybe, playful,

like the early music of Beethoven—

cruised the footings for smelts

clustered near the pylons

in mercury flocks. He

(do I have the gender right?)

would negotiate the rusty hulls

of the Portuguese fishing boats

—Holy Infant, Little Marie—

with what could only be read

as pleasure, coming close

then diving, trailing on the surface

big spreading circles

until he'd breach, thrilling us

with the release of pressured breath,

and the bulk of his sleek young head

—a wet black leather sofa

already barnacled with ghostly lice—

and his elegant and unlikely mouth,

and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,

and the way his broad flippers

resembled a pair of clownish gloves

or puppet hands, looming greenish white

beneath the bay's clouded sheen.

When he had consumed his pleasure

of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,

in his own admired performance,

he swam out the harbor mouth,

into the Atlantic. And though grief

has seemed to me itself a dim,

salt suspension in which I've moved,

blind thing, day by day,

through the wreckage, barely aware

of what I stumbled toward, even I

couldn't help but look

at the way this immense figure

graces the dark medium,

and shines so: heaviness

which is no burden to itself.

What did you think, that joy

was some slight thing?

Here's another poem with a message and an ending that we all need to hear right now!

This incredible poem was published in The Paris Review in their Summer 1996 issue. I looked for a news story from that year for whales in East Coast harbors, but chances are good Doty saw this whale (or the news story) before 1996 (even for Doty, The Paris Review is not known for quick turnaround times), but only found things from the 1600s or from the 2000s. There are a lot of gaps in information from the couple of decades before everything could be found online.

Anyway, this long poem (for my blog, but it is not really that long) is written in tercets, gives readers some beautiful images, great metaphors, questions (2 early on and 1 to end the poem), and just 9 sentences over 21 stanzas. Plus a nod to Beethoven!

We do not learn what the speaker is talking about until stanza 2, but in a skinny poem such as this, the wait is not that long. That slight wait builds interest, of course; I also got a sense of doom reading the first stanza without knowing who the "he" was, which is exactly what the poem aims for, to match the speaker's worry.

One of my favorite descriptions in this poem, from stanza 3:

the salt-flooded folds

of the brain

Although we have a speaker in the first line, the first 4 stanzas focus on the whale. In the 5th stanza, the speaker not only pops back in, but the focus shifts to him. The speaker is our main concern for 2 more stanzas until the very end of stanza 7 when, almost like a volta in a sonnet, the speaker changes course:

Enough,

it wasn't that way at all.

The speaker's pessimism, his worry that the whale is in danger, is not the case. Through to the end of stanza 17, the speaker describes the whale in the harbor, happily exploring, navigating fishing boats, and being curious. The end of the 17th stanza, as with the end of the 7th, there is a change in both the focus of the poem and the knowledge.

This small section is so powerful:

And though grief

has seemed to me itself a dim,

salt suspension in which I've moved,

blind thing, day by day,

through the wreckage,

We have a return to salt and we learn why the speaker had been so quick to assume tragedy in the whale's story; the speaker is grieving, making him view everything negatively. This description of the whale, which also works as well for grief--"heaviness/which is no burden to itself"--gives me chills.

Then the last two lines of that last stanza! The speaker uses "you," talking to himself and all of us, reminding us that joy--be it the whale's joy in his excursion, the speaker's joy in learning about this whale, or any joy any of us experience--is meaningful and important and should be acknowledged.

What did you think, that joy

was some slight thing?

All poems take us on a journey. Some journeys are short and others wind around, whipping us with turns and curves and side roads. This poem is definitely a long journey. The length is not the issue. It is the actualization we get from the changes both the poem and the speaker go through. We are right there with him through it all.

You can read more about Mark Doty here. He has written nonfiction as well as poetry, and his book titles are enticing (even for poets, his stand out): Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Theories and Apparitions, Sweet Machine, and Heaven's Coast are just a few of my favorite titles. Deep Lane (Norton) from 2015 is his most recent collection of poetry. What Is Grass is his most recent book; it's a memoir/look at his own relationship with Walt Whitman and Whitman's poetry.

I met Mark Doty at a poetry conference years ago. At the opening reception, he was standing alone; the other attendees were busy catching up with friends they had not seen in a year and were, I think, a bit too intimidated to talk to him. If you know me, you know that I went right up to him and introduced myself. We had a lovely chat and I called a few others over and introduced them. (I think we gossiped a little about some very famous poets when it was just the two of us; I do remember laughing with him a lot.) And remember that any joy at all is a treasure.