Crepe de Chine- by Mark Doty

 Mark Doty 

Mark Doty (born August 10, 1953) is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.^[1] 

Mark Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee,^[2] to Lawrence and Ruth Doty, with an older sister, Sarah Alice Doty. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.^[3]

Despite the bizarre happenings at the coffeeshop in Des Moines called Smoky Row, in which the poetry group meeting on Zoom experienced odd static which froze our screens and distorted the sound compelling me to log off and miss the reading altogether, and in which I later returned with a friend and inadvertently left my computer satchel unattended on a chair inside the restaurant/coffeehouse while my friend and I talked for an hour on the outdoor patio; I still have fond memories of preparing for that reading in which I learned how to pronounce several new words that appeared in poems by Mark Doty:  bodegas, crepe de chine, tableau, coiffeur, and coiffure.  I found quite a bit of humor in the fact that the word "T-A-B-L-E-A-U"  which has three consecutive vowels is pronounced "tab-blow" wherein those three vowels none of which are an 'O' together are pronounced as a long O.  Thank God I was raised in America and don't have to learn English as a second language!

Of note, two very similar words: COIFFEUR and COIFFURE, are pronounced differently-- and have totally different meanings.  COIFFEUR (qua-'fer) is a male hairdresser and COIFFURE (qua-'fure) is a hairdo.  Crepe de chine is a soft thin material, possibly silk which probably feels pleasant against the skin. 

I also learned the words millefiori, abalone, and verdigris--the last of those words has four optional pronunciations!   Each of these three words ends with a  long "E".   Verdigris by the way is that blue green color on old bronze sculptures, and millefiori is a decorative glass, but the word literally means 1000 flowers.  Always searching for new aliases to use on the internet I like the name Millie Fiori.

millefiori- colored glass

French derivation of "1000 flowers"

I am in awe of this fellow's way with words...and punctuation.  He uses the whole vast array of punctuation in his poetry including colons, hyphens, hyphenated words, and parentheses.  And,  it is particularly irksome the way he breaks up single sentences across paragraphs-- placing the beginning of the phrase at the end of one stanza and the rest of it at the beginning of the next stanza.  Reading aloud some of Mark Doty's poems is equivalent to an athletic event of the tongue.

====  

CREPE DE CHINE, by Mark Doty

These drugstore windows
–one frame in the mile-long film
of lit-up trash and nothing

fronting the avenue, what Balzac called
"the great poem of display"–
are a tableau of huge bottles

of perfume, unbuyable gallons of scent
for women enormous as the movie screens
of my childhood. Spiritual pharmaceuticals

in their deco bottles,
wide-shouldered, flared,
arrayed in their pastel skylines,

their chrome-topped tiers:
a little Manhattan of tinted alcohols.
Only reading their names

–Mme. Rochas, White Shoulders, Crepe de Chine–
and I'm hearing the suss of immense stockings,
whispery static of chiffon stoles

on powdered shoulders,
click of compacts, lisp and soft glide
of blush. And I'm thinking of my wig,

my blonde wig, and following the cold sparkle
of pavement I'm wanting not
these shoes but the black clatter

and covenant of heels. Next door
the Italian baker's hung a canopy of garlands
and silver shot, bee lights and silk ivy

high over the sugary excess
of his pastries, and I want
not his product but his display:

I want to wear it,
I want to put the whole big thing
on my head, I want

the tumbling coiffeurs of heaven,
or lacking that, a wig
tiered and stunning as this island.

That's what I want from this city:
to wear it.
That's what drag is: a city

to cover our nakedness,
silk boulevards, sleek avenues
of organza, the budding trees

along the avenue flaunting their haze
of poisonous Caravaggio green . . .
Look how I take the little florists' shops

and twist them into something
for my hair, forced spiky branches
and a thousand tulips. Look, my sleety veil

of urbane rain descends, unrolls
like cinema's dart and flicker, my skirt
in its ravaged sleekness, the shadows

between buildings raked and angled
into these startling pleats,
descending twilight's gabardine

over the little parks and squares
circled by taxis' hot jewels:
my body

made harmonious with downtown.
Look how I rhyme with the skyscraper's
padded sawtooth shoulders,

look at the secret evidence of my slip
frothing like the derelict river
where the piers used to be,

look at my demolished silhouette,
my gone and reconstructed profile,
look at me built and rebuilt,

torn down to make way,
excavated, trumped out, tricked out,
done, darling,

in every sense of the word. Now,
you call me
Evening in Paris, call me Shalimar,

call me Crepe de Chine.

==

DESCRIPTION BY MARK DOTY

My salt marsh 

--mine, I call it because

these day-hammered fields

of dazzled horizontals

undulate, summers,

inside me and out--

how can I say what it is?

Sea lavender shivers

over the tidewater steel.

A million minnows ally

with their million shadows

(lucky we'll never need

to know whose is whose).

The bud of storm loosens:

watered paint poured

dark blue onto the edge

of the page.  Haloed grasses,

gilt shadow-edged body of dune...

I could go on like this.

I love the language

of the day's ten thousand aspects,

the creases and flecks

in the map, these

brilliant gouaches.

But I'm not so sure it's true, 

what I was taught, that through

the particular's the way

to the universal:

what I need to tell is

swell and curve, shift 

and blur of boundary, 

tremble and spilling over, 

a heady purity distilled

from detail.  A metaphor, then:

in this tourist town, 

the retail legions purvey

the far-flung world's

bangles: brilliance of Nepal

and Mozambique, any place

where cheap labor braids

or burnishes or hammers

found stuff into jewelry's

lush grammar,

a whole vocabulary

of ornament: copper and lacquer,

shells and seeds from backwaters

with fragrant names, millefiori

milled into African beads, Mexican abalone, 

camelbone and tin, cinnebar

and verdigris, silver, 

black onyx, coral,

gold: one vast conjugation

of the verb

to shine.

And that

is the marsh essence--

all the hoarded riches

of the world held

and rivering, a gleam

awakened and doubled

by water, flashing

off the bowing of the grass.

Jewelry, tides, language:

things that shine.

What is description, after all, 

but encoded desire?

And if we say

the marsh, if we forge

terms for it, the isn't it

contained in us, 

a little,

the brightness? 

===

Millefiori