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To Bessie Drennan

By Mark Doty b. 1953 Mark Doty

Because she could find no one else to paint a
picture of the old family place where she and her
sisters lived . . . she attended an adult education
class in Montpelier. In one evening Bessie
Drennan learned everything she would need to
accomplish her goals . . .
The Vermont Folklife Center Newsletter

Bessie, you’ve made space dizzy

with your perfected technique for snow:

white spatters and a dry brush

feathering everything in the world

seem to make the firmament fly.

Four roads converge on the heart of town,

this knot of white and yellow houses

angling off kilter, their astigmatic windows

almost all in rows. Lucky the skater

threading the yellow tavern’s quilt-sized pond,

the yellow dogs who punctuate the village

where our occupations are chasing

and being chaste, sleighing and sledding

and snowshoeing from house to house

in our conical, flamelike hats.

Even the barns are sliding in snow,

though the birches are all golden

and one maple blazes without being consumed.

Is it from a hill nearby we’re watching,

or somewhere in the sky? Could we be flying

on slick runners down into the village?

Is that mare with the elegant legs

truly the size of a house,

and is this the store where everyone bought

those pointed hats, the snowshoes that angle

in contradictory directions?

Isn’t that Rin Tin Tin, bigtongued

and bounding and in two places at once?

Down there in the world’s corner two children

steal away onto the frozen pond,

carrying their toboggan. Even the weathervanes

—bounding fish, a sailing stag—look happy.

The houses are swaying, Bessie,

and nothing is grounded in shadow,

set loose by weather and art

from gravity’s contraints.

And though I think this man is falling,

is it anything but joyous,

the arc his red scarf

transcribes in the air?

Mark Doty, “To Bessie Drennan” from My Alexandria. Copyright © 1993 by Mark Doty. Used by permission of University of Illinois Press.

Source: Poetry (December 1991).

Biography

Since the publication of his first volume of verse, Turtle, Swan, in 1987, Mark Doty has been recognized as one of the most accomplished poets in America. Hailed for his elegant, intelligent verse, Doty has often been compared to James Merrill, Walt Whitman and C.P. Cavafy. His syntactically complex and aesthetically profound free verse poems, odes to urban gay life, and quietly brutal elegies to his lover, Wally Roberts, have . . .

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