Souls On Ice by Mark Doty

    
     "Our metaphors go on ahead of us, they know before we do.  And thank goodness for that, for if I were dependent on other ways of coming to knowledge I think I'd be a very slow study."  Mark Doty was stating that metaphors help us learn & they help us understand.  He was stopped in a grocery store by these "glistening" mackerel and it made him think about the meaning of individuality.  All of these fish were lying there; all of them the same.  I love Doty's line: "Think abalone, the wildly rainbowed mirror of a soapbubble sphere, think sun on gasoline."  It took me a couple times to read and also hear this poem being read to finally catch that imagery he was writing.  It's such great imagery!  "Sun on gasoline,"! I love it!

    Doty talks about how the fish resemble nothing of individuality, and he even questions if "you", the reader, would want to be yourself only.  Although not completely apparent in the poem, in his writing he states "that our glory is not our individuality but our commonness,".  The mackerel are a perfect metaphor for this statement.  They are all the same, just as we humans are.  We all lose our loved ones, as Doty did. 

   This is a pretty deep subject to be discussing!  One line that helps me understand Doty's piece a little more is, "What did it mean to be a self, when that self would be lost?"  He's asking, what does individuality mean when in the end, we just die?  I think he likes to believe in the "togetherness" of our world.  The way I think of it is that we are all a piece of something (humanity), and when we die, that piece still exists without us. 

   I don't quite understand the "heaven" and "soul" in this poem.  Doty does say that he was moving into the "realm of theology" but he doesn't really go any further like I hoped he would.  If he would have made this a more Christian based poem it probably would have lost it's whole purpose.  I'm still trying to wrap my head around the line, "each a perfect fulfillment of heaven's template, mackerel essence,"  because I don't understand what this line means exactly. 


  Overall, I liked this piece by Doty a lot.  Honestly, when death of a loved one is connected to the writing, it seems all the more meaningful and has more power behind it.  I enjoyed the poem because of the previous writing (the explanations from Doty).  He wrote this poem to make himself feel better.  The fish comforted him, and I hope someday when I'm walking through the grocery store that I'll see a pile of mackerel on ice and remember the commonness in life; that we're all the same because we all lose somebody we love.