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A Green Crab's Shell -- Mark Doty

       
(Poem #1838) A Green Crab's Shell
 Not, exactly, green:
 closer to bronze
 preserved in kind brine,

 something retrieved
 from a Greco-Roman wreck,
 patinated and oddly

 muscular. We cannot
 know what his fantastic
 legs were like--

 though evidence
 suggests eight
 complexly folded

 scuttling works
 of armament, crowned
 by the foreclaws'

 gesture of menace
 and power. A gull's
 gobbled the center,

 leaving this chamber
 --size of a demitasse--
 open to reveal

 a shocking, Giotto blue.
 Though it smells
 of seaweed and ruin,

 this little traveling case
 comes with such lavish lining!
 Imagine breathing

 surrounded by
 the brilliant rinse
 of summer's firmament.

 What color is
 the underside of skin?
 Not so bad, to die,

 if we could be opened
 into this--
 if the smallest chambers

 of ourselves,
 similarly,
 revealed some sky.
-- Mark Doty
I like Doty's straightforward, almost stream-of-consciousness style - he
eschews stylistic tricks in favour of saying what he has to say, but his
language is precise and exquisite for all that, and his poems thoughtful and
revealing. Today's is a good example - the crab shell is described in
beautiful detail, with an engaged subjectivity that reinforces its
comparison to a work of art (note, also, the whole life-imitating-art
inversion), and the segue into a more personal musing feels perfectly
natural.

And I love the ending, with its suggestion of an Escherian
worlds-within-worlds landscape - indeed, it was that image that made me
pick this poem out of a collection of Doty's works to run here.

martin

[Links]

We've run one of Doty's poems before, the exquisite Broadway [Poem #1175]:
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1175.html

Biography:
  http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Mark-Doty

Wikipedia entry:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Doty

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