"Knock, Knock"

"Who's there?"
"It's Bill, your next door neighbor, and I have your garbage can."

Well, that's not exactly how it went, but you get the idea. My garbage can, it turns out, wasn't stolen. My neighbor's brother-in-law thought it was theirs and brought it in with their cans. My can was near their cans because the rest of the front of my house was piled high with leaves and branches. I almost didn't tell you guys, but I don't want those who read from far away to think Clinton is choking with crime.

Well, this is it, actually two its. Today is the final day of National Poetry Month and of COM 308 and COM 307, the two writing classes I've been teaching. It has been a great semester. It has been a pretty darn good National Poetry Month. To wrap up the month, I offer you my favorite poem, even though I already posted it awhile ago on the first version of my blog.



Visitation

When I heard he had entered the harbor,
and circled the wharf for days,
I expected the worst: shallow water,

confusion, some accident to bring
the young humpback to grief.
Don't they depend on a compass

lodged in the salt-flooded folds
of the brain, some delicate
musical mechanism to navigate

their true course? How many ways,
in our century's late iron hours,
might we have led him to disaster?

That, in those days, was how
I'd come to see the world:
dark upon dark, any sense

of spirit an embattled flame
sparked against wind-driven rain
till pain snuffed it out. I thought,

This is what experience gives us ,
and I moved carefully through my life
while I waited. . . Enough,

it wasn't that way at all. The whale
—exuberant, proud maybe, playful,
like the early music of Beethoven—

cruised the footings for smelts
clustered near the pylons
in mercury flocks. He

(do I have the gender right?)
would negotiate the rusty hulls
of the Portuguese fishing boats

— Holy Infant, Little Marie —
with what could only be read
as pleasure, coming close

then diving, trailing on the surface
big spreading circles
until he'd breach, thrilling us

with the release of pressured breath,
and the bulk of his sleek young head
— a wet black leather sofa

already barnacled with ghostly lice —
and his elegant and unlikely mouth,
and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,

and the way his broad flippers
resembled a pair of clownish gloves
or puppet hands, looming greenish white

beneath the bay's clouded sheen.
When he had consumed his pleasure
of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,

in his own admired performance,
he swam out the harbor mouth,
into the Atlantic. And though grief

has seemed to me itself a dim,
salt suspension in which I've moved,
blind thing, day by day,

through the wreckage, barely aware
of what I stumbled toward, even I
couldn't help but look

at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness

which is no burden to itself.
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?

~ Mark Doty ~


When I met Mark Doty he seemed surprised that this was my favorite of all of his poems. How could it not be? Why don't you all put up your favorite poems in a post, and we'll commemorate the end of National Poetry Month together?