Poem-A-Day: Spent by Mark Doty

Spent by Mark Doty     Late August morning I go out to cut spent and faded hydrangeas--washed greens, russets, troubled little auras of sky as if these were the very silks of Versailles, mottled by rain and ruin then half-restored, after all this time... When I come back with my handful I realize I've accidentally locked the door, and can't get back into the house. The dining room window's easiest; crawl through beauty bush and spirea, push aside some errant maples, take down the wood-framed screen, hoist myself up. But how, exactly, to clamber across the sill and the radiator down to the tile? I try bending one leg in, but I don't fold readily; I push myself up so that my waist rests against the sill, and lean forward, place my hands on the floor and begin to slide down into the room, which makes me think this was what it was like to be born: awkward, too big for the passageway... Negotiate, submit?                           When I give myself to gravity there I am, inside, no harm, the dazzling splotchy flowerheads scattered around me on the floor. Will leaving the world be the same --uncertainty as to how to proceed, some discomfort, and suddenly you're --where? I am so involved with this idea I forget to unlock the door, so when I go to fetch the mail, I'm locked out again. Am I at home in this house, would I prefer to be out here, where I could be almost anyone? This time it's simpler: the window-frame, the radiator, my descent. Born twice in one day!                 In their silvered jug, these bruise-blessed flowers: how hard I had to work to bring them into this room. When I say spent, I don't mean they have no further coin. If there are lives to come, I think they might be a littler easier than this one. Copyright © 2013 by Mark Doty. Used with permission of the author. About this Poem:   "One day last summer I locked myself out of the house twice; wriggling through a window and down onto the floor, I had the odd sensation that it might have felt something like that to be born. The poem began as pure narration, and it took me many drafts to start teasing out its deeper implications. This time it felt right just to suggest them, and leave them hanging in the air a bit, reverberating...I think this is the pattern of a life, in a way, to be born and spent and born again." Mark Doty Poetry by Doty Fire to Fire    Poem-A-Day launched in 2006 and features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.   Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org. April 23, 2013  Mark Doty is the author of numerous  collections of poetry including, Fire to  Fire: New and Selected Poems   (Harper Perennial, 2008), which won  the National Book Award. Doty is a  Chancellor of the Academy of  American Poets. He teaches at  Rutgers University and lives in New  York.    Photo credit: Star Black Related Poems A Blessing by James Wright Spring Storm by William Carlos Williams The Letter by Mary Ruefle

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