This post was submitted by selena

I went to the National Mall for Memorial Day because that’s what you’re supposed to do. It was my third cultural pilgrimage there:

1. In seventh grade, to learn about the government on a field trip with my Montessori class.
2. In twelfth grade, to hang out with my Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones.
3. Yesterday, because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

I found a parade, and a crowd of strangely distracted onlookers. They clapped on cue, and craned to see the floats, bought hot dogs and red white and blue popsicles. Vendors of tie-dye ‘I heart DC’ t-shirts popped up every half a block.

I wandered away from the parade, up to the Washington monument and then all the way down to Lincoln. Rain threatened, but held off. At the reflecting pool, a British family fed the ducks and geese. Another family rode their bikes through the grass wearing matching yellow helmets. Along the WWII and Vietnam memorials, people left bouquets of flowers, and notes, and wreaths. Everyone had a camera in their hands, framing the perfect shot of the goose flapping its wings or the postcard shot of the big stone buildings.

I ended up feeling unsatisfied. I couldn’t write the day off as kitschy, or reap the satisfaction of a soulful, earnest reflection on sacrifice. It was something else. Nobody around me seemed either dismissive or reverent. Many seemed to be wandering, like me.

Mark Doty is one of the poets I go to in moments like this, when I’m struggling to wrap my arms around an experience. “Human Figures” embodies that feeling of moving through a city and trying to fit the strange, private moments of others into your understanding. Masterfully, it succeeds— tying messy, disconnections together in a spectacular arrival, the release of thematic sense that is such a privilege of poetry. It is also a mysterious poem, much more moving than I expect each time I read it.

So this Memorial Day, consider “Human Figures” by Mark Doty.

Human Figures

On the Number 15 bus on Potrero Hill,
San Francisco, a morning of clouds shifting
like ripples on silk, a black man
a few seats in front of me covers his lap

with Chinese newspapers and smooths
the rumpled sheets across his thighs
over and over. I think he’s hiding
something beneath the, himself perhaps,

until looking directly out the windows
with their clouds he begins to tear
the sheets of newspaper in half
and rolls the delicate black moss

of calligraphy into a cone, twists it
into something intricate between his broad hands,
something he doesn’t want anyone to see.
Then he places whatever he’s made

on the seat beside him and covers it,
covertly, another sheet of news,
and tears and rolls, furiously, as though
he can’t make one things and leave it alone.

I think he’s seen me watching,
and I try not to look as he keeps
rolling faster, till we reach a stop
and a quick gust of wind from the door

lifts the paper veil just enough to reveal
what he’s made. Once, in Boston,
a vagrant lay on one of the long stone benches
by the Public Library, bleeding.

I don’t know what had happened;
a little crescent of people clustered,
waiting for the ambulance
to work its way through traffic.

I didn’t want to be like them,
didn’t want to look, and a sheet of newspaper,
a page of the Globe ripping down Boylston,
skittered across the red slick of him and tumbled

toward me, the stain already drying
on four columns of news. Soon
it wouldn’t even be recognizable,
the blood in its morning edition

blowing across my shoes. Suppose the ambulance
hadn’t come and he’d kept on bleeding,
a stain larger than his own body
darkening the cement and all the paper

blown along those windy steps?
Imagine he’d kept on publishing himself
until his outline were larger than anything
the police could chalk, uncontained,

the shapeless bulletin of the news you can’t buy,
though you can’t help but read it.
And the man in San Francisco twists his papers
into dolls, tiny human forms—

like ginseng roots floating
in Chinatown windows, long limbs streaming out
behind them—figures molded
into something intimate, something to hide.

From Fire to Fire  (Harper Perennial) © Mark Doty 1993.

Intrigued?

Mark Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee. He’s won many awards, including the National Book Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Awared, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He’s writen a huge amount of poems in his lifetime, and he just published “Fire to Fire,” which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. Read more on his website, and, as always, on poetryfoundation.org.

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