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Sweet Machine, published in 1998, is Mark Doty’s fifth collection. In Doty’s own words ‘Sweet Machine represents a turn towards participation in the world – agreeing, as it were, to be here, to desire, to love, even in the aftermath of loss’.

   Like Thom Gunn, he is an eloquent and moving witness to the AIDS tragedy. Implicit in love and beauty is the inevitability of loss – an enduring theme for poets, but through the insistence of his writing and lyric language he reveals his desire for love in spite of personal loss.

   ‘Favrile’, the first poem in the collection, is a glassmaker’s term. It was chosen by its inventor, Tiffany, from an old Saxon word meaning ‘hand wrought’. One of the stanzas in this poem anticipates ‘White Kimono’ – which is the poem I will talk about:

     For the kimono woven,
     dipped in dyes, unravelled
     and loomed again

and further on the image of silk sleeves:

     For the silk sleeves

     of the puppet queen,
     held at a ravishing angle
     over her puppet lover slain…

   I have focused on ‘White Kimono’ because of the intensity with which Doty has recreated the shop, a world in which he, Lynda (a friend) and Wally browse (Wally Roberts, Doty’s long-term partner, died of AIDS in 1994). What attracts me to this poem are the different spaces the poem evokes and the smoothness of the transition between them: from the small intimate spaces of the shop and the kitchen, to the large landscapes of Japan and America.

   By starting the poem with, sleeves of oyster, smoke and pearl, Doty takes us in, close up, and we can see clearly the distinctive shape of kimono sleeves. If the first line introduces us to the kimono, the second, linings patterned with chrysanthemum flurries, takes us inside it. At the same time flurries of chrysanthemum brings to mind a gust of snow that takes the reader outside (rippled fields)and beyond the store. The chrysanthemum, also the emperor’s flower, (the imperial crest is a stylised chrysanthemum) admired in Japan for its own intrinsic beauty was brought to Japan from T’ang China where it was associated with long life; it is an autumn Doesn’t rain make a memory more intimate? flower. This property of this particular flower is poignant in the circumstances, as we will discover later in the poem when Wally’s illness is made apparent. It is also not one of the kimonos taken home.

   The senses are important in calling up the intimate spaces in this poem. The first line of the second stanza: received a shipment of old robes, conjures up a musty smell that is dispelled in the second line by cleaned but neither pressed nor sorted. Doty continues into the third stanza, personifying the kimonos: and the owner’s cut the bindings / so the bales of crumpled silks / swell and breathe. This personification summons those who’ve worn these garments before, in another country and another time – from the old world to the new. We’re then told, It’s raining out, off-season, / nearly everything closed and this reference to rain makes the indoor scene more hermetic, a magic place insulated from the outside and the realities of life. We hear the rain and feel warm and protected inside the store.

   From the fourth stanza until the change in focus at the seventh, we are given more descriptions of kimonos which, again, evoke landscapes that take us outside the shop: clouds of — / are they plum blossoms? Plum blossoms are often used to decorate winter kimonos to suggest the eagerly awaited spring, they are the first to blossom each year, a symbol of renewal: thunderheads / of pine mounting a stony slope, – the pine is a symbol of longevity, as pine trees live for many years and remain green all year round.

   When the focus changes, it is to a close-up: And there, / against the back wall, a garment / which seems itself an artifact // of dream: tiny gossamer sleeves / like moth wings worrying a midnight lamp, translucent silk so delicate. This is the first reference to the white kimono and the first intimation of fragility and transience. It comes at roughly a third of the way through the poem. Doty builds on the sense of fragility in the next three stanzas: it might shatter at the weight / of a breath or glance. The reader has by this point travelled through colourful landscapes and been made aware of history and other cultures, and all in the  enclosed world of the store, protected from the elements. The focus on the white kimono comes after the opulence, colour and exuberance of the preceding description.

   Then the trying on of kimonos: deep blue for Lynda, a long scholarly grey for me, / severe, slightly pearly, meditative. For the first time Wally is mentioned in the fourteenth stanza: a rough raw silk for Wally, / its slubbed green the colour of day-old grass / wet against lawn-mower blades. Home. This grass image is vivid, both in the look and smell of it, in its contrast with what we imagine of Wally’s pallor. We discover in the sixteenth stanza that he is ill: Wally comes out and sits with us, too, and then: though he’s already tired all the time. The significance of the adverb tells us that although this (his tiredness) was expected, it has happened sooner and therefore this one word signifies so much: already signals that Wally must have been ill for some time, and it implies the next stage of a serious and terminal illness and along with it a sense of inevitability.

   Doty then takes us into another enclosed world, the kitchen at home: we iron till the kitchen steams, and rain is mentioned again and the three of us fog up the rainy windows, and later on Doesn’t rain make a memory more intimate? This use of the pathetic fallacy is effective andappropriate. It wouldn’t be too fanciful to suggest that imbuing the natural world with human feelings is exemplified by the rain as tears. While talking, ironing, imagining mulberry acres, we have a feeling of being in a cocoon in the steamy kitchen and in fact cocoons are mentioned in the next stanza – and the endless / labour of unwinding the cocoons. The mulberry acres and the rain take us outside momentarily, but then: We’re pleased with our own calm privacy, / our part in the works of restoration, / that kitchen’s achieved, common warmth.

   In the midst of the warmth and protection of the kitchen, and the conviviality of friends, Doty returns us to that ‘fluttering spirit’, the kimono of the title, hung in the shop / like a lunar token, something / the ghost of a moth might have worn. This fluttering kimono is a reminder of mortality, so fragile even Lynda, slight as she was, / did not dare to try on. That last line of the poem is masterful in its plain language and the use of the word dare, and the implication of what it would mean to try on in the context of the poem. In Japan and other far eastern countries, white is for mourning (also for a virgin bride), the colour of purity for transition from one world to the next. Close relatives of the deceased wear a white kimono that is shorter than usual, just below knee-length, made of cotton or linen (though it could be silk too) andsome sort of white cotton ‘leg warmers’ are worn. The body is also dressed in this type of kimono. (When Basho set out on his journey recorded in The Narrow Road to the Far North, he wore such a kimono, as he expected to die.)

   Doty, talking about his work, has said that he goes in the direction of expansion, that he opens doors to see where they might lead, even if he doesn’t use what he finds. If you keep writing you are more likely to bring back what you don’t know. Interestingly he circled round the moment of this poem in prose first in Heaven’s Coast (Cape 1994) and from that book we would learn that Lynda died too. In this poem there is joy and grief, love and friendship played out in spaces that are both part of and away from the world.
Initially I was drawn to ‘White Kimono’ because I have spent time in Japan, and also it reminded me of an experience in a small shop in Dharamshala, in the Himalayan foothills, where I was trying on dresses and pashminas, sipping Kashmiri tea and chatting with friends for several hours.

   ‘White Kimono’ is eloquent and elegiac and the writing is as delicate as that fluttering spirit of a kimono. I have found that the more I have studied this poem, the more it has yielded and I urge other readers to do the same.