The cat forgotten on the moon.

Description
by Mark Doty

My salt marsh
-mine, I call it, because
these day-hammered fields

of dazzled horizontals
undulate, summers,
inside me and out-

how can I say what it is?
Sea lavender shivers
over the tidewater steel.

A million minnows ally
with their million shadows
(lucky we’ll never need

to know whose is whose).
The bud of storm loosens:
watered paint poured

dark blue onto the edge
of the page. Haloed grasses,
gilt shadow-edged body of dune…

I could go on like this.
I love the language
of the day’s ten thousand aspects,

the creases and flecks
in the map, these
brilliant gouaches.

But I’m not so sure it’s true,
what I was taught, that through
the particular’s the way

to the universal:
what I need to tell is
swell and curve, shift

and blur of boundary,
tremble and spilling over,
a heady purity distilled

from detail. A metaphor, then:
in this tourist town,
the retail legions purvey

the far-flung world’s
bangles: brilliance of Nepal
and Mozambique, any place

where cheap labor braids
or burnishes or hammers
found stuff into jewelry’s

lush grammar,
a whole vocabulary
of ornament: copper and lacquer,

shells and seeds from backwaters
with fragrant names, millefiori
milled into African beads, Mexican abalone,

camelbone and tin, cinnabar
And verdigris, silver,
black onyx, coral,

gold: one vast conjugation
of the verb
To shine.

And that
is the marsh essence—-
all the hoarded riches

of the world held
and rivering, a gleam
awakened and doubled

by water flashing
off the bowing of the grass.
Jewelry, tides, language:
things that shine.
what is description, after all
but encoded desire?

And if we say
the marsh, if we forge
terms for it, then isn’t it

contained in us,
a little,
the brightness?