"Heaven for Helen" by Mark Doty

My Grandma Helen passed away yesterday. Today I was combing through poetry looking for poems for my class to read and came across Mary Doty's "Heaven for Helen." I'd read this before but -- I don't want to say I'd forgotten it, because that's not accurate, exactly. But it seems like a serendipitous reunion to read it today.

Heaven for Helen

Helen says heaven, for her,
would be complete immersion
in physical process,
without self-consciousness—

to be the respiration of the grass,
or ionized agitation
just above the break of a wave,
traffic in a sunflower's thousand golden rooms.

Images of exchange,
and of untrammeled nature.
But if we're to become part of it all,
won't our paradise also involve

participation in being, say,
diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks
on August pavement,
weird glow of service areas

along the interstate at night?
We'll be shiny pink egg cartons,
and the thick treads of burst tires
along the highways in Pennsylvania:

a hell we've made to accompany
the given: we will join
our tiresome productions,
things that want to be useless forever.

But that's me talking. Helen
would take the greatest pleasure
in being a scrap of paper,
if that's what there were to experience.

Perhaps that's why she's a painter,
finally: to practice disappearing
into her scrupulous attention,
an exacting rehearsal for the larger

world of things it won't be easy to love.
Helen I think will master it, though I may not.
She has practiced a long time learning to see
I have devoted myself to affirmation,

when I should have kept my eyes on the ground.

(Mark Doty, from School of the Arts, 2005 HarperCollins.)

Shiny in Seattle: Mark Doty

The Seattlest interviews Mark Doty in two parts. I've interviewed him before. He's a really nice guy and smart and interesting to boot. He's one of the best readers I've had the luck to hear/see. Reverence without pretense.

From the Seattlest interview: "[W]hat's not to like about glitter and sparkly stuff, the trappings that have been making drag queens (and real ones) shine since the dawn of time?"

And this, about reading as a child: "There were many animal books and stories that made me weep with their profound sense that we were isolated from animals, that we could never really be with them because our lives were shaped by words but theirs were not. I thought this was the saddest thing in the world. I remember one night I finished a book in bed, about some chidren who could understand the speech of cats when they took a special medicine, but then of course they had to go back to the human world. I was crying in my bed about the book, and my father found me, and told me I couldn't read any more sad books."

See? He's great.

Also, Doty is apparently putting out a handbook called The Art of Description: World into Word. According to Amazon, it's scheduled to come out on July 20 (which is my son's first birthday. Coincidence. Well, yeah. Still), but the Graywolf site says August. Time will tell.

Thanks, Laura, for the tip.