Would You Rebuild Atlantis If You Knew You Would Drown There?

I'm going back and rereading the poetry books that initially excited me about the written and spoken word. First up, Mark Doty's Atlantis. This is the first of probably three interactions about how my response to this book changed over twenty years.

Sidenote, the title is a line from my poem, How To Survive A Sixty Hour Work Week On Just Above Minimum Wage. While it is, of course, a reference to the lost city, it is also a reference to Mark Doty's book and the time of my life when I first read it.

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Atlantis At Nineteen

1. Colorblindness

Sun starved leaves
A handful of wet beach ready for sculpture
The color of a paper bag under transparent tape
                                        protecting textbooks from my clumsy adolescence
Horseshoe crab shell
All of these things we'd touched together And all i could think of
when you took off your hat in your parents' basement was
You have brown hair

It was only in the darkness that I could realize
the misdiagnosis of your hair color
Two years of loving someone without
noticing this basic physical trait

I was still flash cards at lust
Heart
Sex
Breath
Touch

At a bar with my coworkers 
from the Reconnaissance Faire
I didn't note 
the leather taut
atlassing the twin planets of the wax maiden
as the exhaust of her day and her bourbon
warmed my ear

I thought why is this woman 
blowing in my ear?

Everything so straight
                           forward

I didn't even know her name
just the job she weekended for two months of the year
The best part of her year
when her ex took her two twelve year old sons
and she dipped hands and roses into hot wax
and blew hot air into the ears of nineteen year old gay boys
too paralyzed to turn their heads

I was of course staring at you
a single row of straight white stones
the lower shelf never
cresting your bottom lip

On the drive home you kissed your own hot air
towards me without so much as leaning closer

This was how I learned to love with distance



2. Strangers & Family Members Are Fiction

I did not choose Mark Doty's "Long Point Light"
                               for its language
                               for how I would later imagine it
                                      an apt description of our relationship

You liked lighthouses

I was too stiff for "Homo
Shall Not Inherit" 

The assignment
                               read a poem to a diverse group of people
                               ask them to tell you what the poem means

Diverse on Cape Cod
               in 1998
               meant my ashen mother
                            my pasty boss
                            the blanched friends of the pale children I nannied
                            the cobweb customers at my corporate record store job
                            my eggshell psychology classmates
Diverse meant not the same age
                                                    job
                                                    level of education

All these diverse listeners patiently described what this poem
which was so obviously about how 
every day was a new opportunity to be honest with you and
                                                                                                myself
was so obviously about how I could see metaphor only
in things you cared about
All of these diverse listeners presented me with their own
incorrect translations of this obvious poem
Mistaking Doty's hazing and
                                flickering as an invitation to 
build their own lighthouse to 
monument

I bought whiteboard 
I mod podged photos of your favorite lighthouses
  printed out all these wrong interpretations of what was
obviously our poem and threw away everyone else's truth

I drew crude approximations of boats
             emerald fiberglass like your favorite color of seaglass
             polyurethaned wood like your hair
             silver like your car
             barn red like your duvet

Each boat labeled with the description of an imaginary person
The waves beneath them
                    fake quotes I attributed to them
                                          each one a different way I looked at the poem
                             except 
                             of course 
                                               yours

Who else had ever had an opinion that mattered?


3. There Is Never Enough Ocean

I was twenty and selfish without understanding what my self was
                                              like everytwenty
                                              like everyyounglover

I read Atlantis but came away with only "Long Point Light"
  said everything else was ocean and shimmer
I had enough ocean around me
          enough shimmer when I tried to look to the future