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
This poem is so visual I feel the tactile sensation of the image every time I read it. I’m in a phase right now that makes it difficult for me to language the interior dialogue. Being in the studio every day with my head down, I feel my center of gravity shifting away from that place where sentences delivered in cogent order are created. Word-weary, I would prefer to just point a finger at a colony of color hatched in an unexpected place or just sit in silence with how spring opens itself—wildly, but with a cosmic blueprint. Just how I’d like to be in the making of my own something new.