Free Write, Week 4

Improv: “Door to the River” by Mark Doty

He means, I think, there’s an out,

built of these fistfuls of yellows.
Means, I think, there’s a door,

in this passionate and hard-won
approximation, in this rough push

and lemon smear, this difficulty,

there’s—what? In the meadows,
yesterday, great heavy presences

of the trees thinking, rimmed

around the perimeter of the field:
pendulous, weighted trees

here to be emerald pull
and resistance, suspended

their given hour, the meadow arranging itself

into this huge composition which invites
and resists at once, the world’s hung

surface: aren’t we always wanting
to push beyond it, as if behind the scrim

--old lure and spur, old promise—

lay…The bright core
breathing? Why can’t you just

love sheer play, these forms’
dynamic irresolutions

on the surface of the day?

These trees only seem still,
fixed their hour in the rush

and suction from that gate:
can’t you just walk between the yellow

word field and the green word door
and not demand to penetrate

the primed and stubborn scrim
toward some clarity beyond forms?

Written in a sidewalks new cement:
Be happy it’s really all you have.

Happiness? Our possession
is yellow and green, dialectic

occupying the meadows,

arranging for us this moment
and the next (I’m not afraid

to die, I’m afraid to continue
in this tumult of collisions

and vanishing),
the ocher word
meadow, the green word door.
Listen,
there’s a door in these yellow handfuls,
these wild strokes
Haven’t you walked

into something like happiness but larger?
Just yesterday, inside the meadow’s

goldenrod perimeter,
near evening, in the stubble-grass,

eye-level with furled umbles
of wild carrot, chains of burr

and burdock and the clovers’ half dry blooms,

I pressed my stomach against
the warm surface of the field,

sunlight drowsing and slanting
toward us while the dogs and I

lay easy and with no need to be
anywhere. We heard a woman calling,

in a European accent, German maybe, her dog,

her chocolate Lab, who was mousing
with great patience and dedication, and she

with her patience and dedication
was calling Jackie, Jackie without urgency

because she knew Jackie would come.

That’s when I went through
the door. It was her voice,

the name pronounced softly
over and over and above the tender

yellow scent of the grass and the hurry

of intimately related and endlessly
varied yellows, the sunflowers’

golden insistences, little violet
spiking in the eyes of asters

sparking the whole field into something

like a quivering although entirely still,
and still my two curled companions

not sleeping but like me

alert and perhaps also poised
at an instance when the whole ceaseless

push and tumble arrived at some
balance and there was no lack, nothing

missing from the world,
and for the duration of that sheen

—during which you know
this moment of equipoise

is more movement of light

and flesh and grass passing through
the corridor, the world’s mild maw

of dynamic motion—
Jackie, she said, Jackie, yellow word,

and for that astonished instant

hung on the other side, permitted
entrance to the steep

core of things you think
of course this is what death

will be. Fine.

Revision:
I think he means the emerald figures, the trees who won
over the lawyers from Birmingham, Alabama.
We never look at the lemon smeared sunsets the same way.
Arranging themselves, those dogwoods and pine,
as if suspended by earthen glory, a composition written,
the pendulum of their bodies always reminded
him of their solemn promise. How else would death
call us he would ask as we passed through the
door of two arching branches that clung to our arms.
Simulacrum is a yellow word I tell him. It’s green
he would reply. As children we wrote our names
on the sidewalk next to imprinted hands that were
not our own, though we claimed them to be. The city
lights always lingered on our eyes back then, a golden
insistence. Now, we strip heads of grass from a nearby meadow,
though some refused to bend to a will other than their own.
Happiness was never a color to us, but a whimper
of a Whippoorwill. That is how death calls us I tell him. Fine.