The state of mind above which my distraction floats like fog is suddenly perfectly clear, though the right word for it is less immediately available. Grief is too sharp and immediate; maybe its the high pitch of the vowel sound, or the monosyllabic impact of the word, as quick a jab as knife or cut. Sadness is too ephemeral, somehow; it sounds like something that comes and goes, a response to an immediate cause which will pass in a little while as another cause arises to generate a different feeling. Mourning isnt bad, but theres something a little archaic about it. I think of widows keening, striking themselves- dark-swathed years, a closeting of self away from the world, turned inward toward an interior dark. Sorrow feels right , for now. Sorrow seems large and inhabitable, an interior season whose vaulted skys a suitable match for the gray and white tumult arched over these headlands. A sorrow is not to be gotten over or moved through in quite the way that sadness is, yet sorrow is also not as frozen and monochromatic as mourning. Sadness exists inside my sorrow, but its not as large as sorrows realm. This sorrow is capacious; theres room inside it for the everyday, for going about the workaday stuff of life. And for loveliness, for whatever were to be given by the daily walk.
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About Mark Doty
Mark Doty was a contemporary American poet and memoirist. Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. Read more on Wikipedia →