And thus this poem, which is called "Description".
"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 shadows-edged body of dune.
I could go on like this.
I love the language of the days 10,000 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, camel bone, and tin.
Cinnabar 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 revering.
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,
then isn't it contained in us a little?
The brightness?"
Thanks.
I wanted to begin with that poem partly because I
want to talk about place.
But also because I hope it opens a consideration
about language, the nature of naming what we see,
or naming what we love, that perhaps other poems here
might comment upon as well.