Moving as a Pack, Part I: Hearing Things

Mark Doty’s poem A Display of Mackerel and the beauty in numbers

When you’re a pre-teen,  you don’t like to stumble upon conversations between adults, in the same way you don’t want to walk downstairs to get a glass of water in the middle of the night and see your parents doing the bump with the Rosenthals from up the street. 

Maybe the Sullivans were there, too. That’d be six of them holding their drinks aloft and aiming their unsteady middles toward each other. I keep missing your bum hahaha! Mr. Rosenthal is also your dentist. Hearing him say “bum” is unsettling. 

Once you begin to see things like this, there’s no going back—only endless turning away, which you’ll do for the next several years. In the meantime, you can’t stop overhearing or overseeing. From the back seat of the car or doing your homework in the next room, you hear adults talking. You connect the dots and decode some of the euphemisms and references. There are backstories to everything and everyone, you learn. The adults don’t know yet that you’ve started listening. It’s like walking in on someone, but you’re the one who’s naked.

***

I was 12 and at a gymnastics meet about to compete with my team. While marking my floor routine, I noticed my coach, Dick, talking to one of the floor exercise judges. She was pretty and seemed young. I overheard him say See that one? and saw him nodding toward me. She’s the one to watch. The only one on my team with style.

It was an unnerving and transgressive comment coming from an adult I counted on to feel exactly the same toward all of us, like I thought parents did with their kids. And why was he even talking to the judge and telling her secret things about the team? Was that even allowed in the world of recreational competitive town sports? Anyway, I pretended not to hear this first comment or its even more outlandish follow-up, something like: The only one with something special.

My still-then-beloved coach Dick Ferguson, with his strange, ridiculous, and surprising proclamations, had set me apart and away from my teammates. I didn’t think coaches were supposed to do that. Sadly, Ferguson would go on to do much more alarming things than play favorites.

I pretended to go chalk up my hands. I stood at the basin and watched my teammates doing their tumbling passes. In theory, they were warming up for the meet, but really they were trying to spook or impress the other team by adding in some too-advanced, last-minute flip or twist. One of us always got hurt during this dumb foreplay and had to sit out for the whole meet, which we’d then go on to lose. I loved those girls. Even the ones I didn’t like, I loved. I was proud to be a member of the Little Leprechauns town recreational gymnastics team.

None of us would go far. We’d all started too late or didn’t have enough money to go to the next level. Some of us already smoked pot, etc. But that team was my first outside-the-family communal group. I loved who I was with them, and who I became. Those teenage underdogs from assorted Merrimack Valley towns gave me people to move with, and a pack to call my own. We rode our bikes at dusk to the industrial park where our gym was. We did exhibitions at the local mall dressed in our green leotards and got leered at by older boys and men in the Papa Gino’s. We loved Olga Korbut. It was 1975. 

 ***

In 2015, there’s a small boy on the sidewalk across the street from an idling car. He’s standing just outside a circle of other 12 year old boys. The group is a closed system, like an ant farm or a castle with a moat and a drawbridge. The boys in the circle are much bigger than the other boy, some by a foot. Their adult-size bodies move in stop-motion herky-jerky.

The small boy looks like he’s about 8, and he never forgets it, even when his parents say you’ll grow soon don’t worry it’ll happen or you’re so good at this or that and so smart we love you. What are they supposed to say? He’s one of a kind and such a beauty. Funny boy, worried about anti-matter and if things are real. And do we see the same red when we look at red. Always singing, too, like a little Leonard Cohen. Okay, the parents tell him. We’ll take you to an endocrinologist.

The boy remembers moving in packs with these boys–girls, too–when they were all little. His body craves the simple and sure intimacies. Sleeping on toddler cots lined up on the floor, tiny hands clutching, breathing steady, dreaming of cake. He’s not sure how to get back there.

For now, on the sidewalk in front of the middle school, he finds an opening in the circle of boys. But he laughs too loud and talks too much, or in the wrong places. Pretty soon, out of sync with the other boys’ inside jokes and cons and boob talk, he wanders off toward the cement-colored school. There’s a rage fermenting in his belly that he doesn’t know about yet. It’ll give him some trouble later. The whole thing will take years to figure out. The car across the street moves away. The boy grows to be six feet and two inches tall.

***

When we’re reading Mark Doty’s A Display of Mackerel, the students and I wonder about the ways we’re individual and ways we’re communal. What things become possible only when we set aside our individual identity in service of the community? But then, what about personality and self-expression? Can we have both school uniforms and guitar solos? 

Here’s the poem:

A Display of Mackerel by Mark Doty

They lie in parallel rows, 
on ice, head to tail, 
each a foot of luminosity 

barred with black bands, 
which divide the scales’ 
radiant sections 

like seams of lead 
in a Tiffany window. 
Iridescent, watery 

prismatics: think abalone, 
the wildly rainbowed 
mirror of a soapbubble sphere, 

think sun on gasoline. 
Splendor, and splendor, 
and not a one in any way 

distinguished from the other 
—nothing about them 
of individuality. Instead 

they’re all exact expressions 
of the one soul, 
each a perfect fulfilment 

of heaven’s template, 
mackerel essence. As if, 
after a lifetime arriving 

at this enameling, the jeweler’s 
made uncountable examples, 
each as intricate 

in its oily fabulation 
as the one before 
Suppose we could iridesce, 

like these, and lose ourselves 
entirely in the universe 
of shimmer—would you want 

to be yourself only, 
unduplicatable, doomed 
to be lost? They’d prefer, 

plainly, to be flashing participants, 
multitudinous. Even now 
they seem to be bolting 

forward, heedless of stasis. 
They don’t care they’re dead 
and nearly frozen, 

just as, presumably, 
they didn’t care that they were living: 
all, all for all, 

the rainbowed school 
and its acres of brilliant classrooms, 
in which no verb is singular, 

or every one is. How happy they seem, 
even on ice, to be together, selfless, 
which is the price of gleaming.

We think about those multitudes that move as a single entity and the magic (or sometimes horror) of that. We talk about murmurations and symphonies and choreographed dances and mackerel. But also about militaries marching and harm going viral. We talk about what an architect of language Doty is, and about words like shimmering and gleaming that make the whole bottom part of our faces move when we say them. We think not just abalone, or sun on gasoline. We think mother and baby in birth. We think flash mobs. We think relay teams and power trios. 

Some students say it takes a certain kind of individual to give themselves over to the communal endeavor. Is it confidence? Love? It seems like it might be both?

High school students are asked to switch between being individuals and a collective of meaning-makers every day. I know this is true in English class, but I think it’s probably true in all high school classes, and most friendships, to boot. How does one stay loyal to the self and to the group–and (in the case of English class) to the poem or the work being studied? How to balance desire and patience? How to practice risk and care? Hold multiple truths, we tell them. But can we?

Back to the words: We say certain ones over and over because we like how they sound– words like oily and abalone. A student says it’s crazy when you say any word over and over it turns into some weird other thing, like a chant or nonsense. We try it with everyday words like that and soon and mustard.

One student says We’re so into individuality in this culture. I feel like I have to prove 24/7 that I’m not a follower. 

Another says Dead fish in a supermarket. Thought-provoking. Who knew?

And another: What if you can lead and follow at the same time? Isn’t that what a school of fish does anyway? 

And what could I possibly add to that? Here’s the poem again:

A Display of Mackerel by Mark Doty

They lie in parallel rows, 
on ice, head to tail, 
each a foot of luminosity 

barred with black bands, 
which divide the scales’ 
radiant sections 

like seams of lead 
in a Tiffany window. 
Iridescent, watery 

prismatics: think abalone, 
the wildly rainbowed 
mirror of a soapbubble sphere, 

think sun on gasoline. 
Splendor, and splendor, 
and not a one in any way 

distinguished from the other 
—nothing about them 
of individuality. Instead 

they’re all exact expressions 
of the one soul, 
each a perfect fulfilment 

of heaven’s template, 
mackerel essence. As if, 
after a lifetime arriving 

at this enameling, the jeweler’s 
made uncountable examples, 
each as intricate 

in its oily fabulation 
as the one before 
Suppose we could iridesce, 

like these, and lose ourselves 
entirely in the universe 
of shimmer—would you want 

to be yourself only, 
unduplicatable, doomed 
to be lost? They’d prefer, 

plainly, to be flashing participants, 
multitudinous. Even now 
they seem to be bolting 

forward, heedless of stasis. 
They don’t care they’re dead 
and nearly frozen, 

just as, presumably, 
they didn’t care that they were living: 
all, all for all, 

the rainbowed school 
and its acres of brilliant classrooms, 
in which no verb is singular, 

or every one is. How happy they seem, 
even on ice, to be together, selfless, 
which is the price of gleaming.

© Mark Doty, Atlantis: Poems (HarperPerennial, 1995)

Here is Doty reading it (and talking a bit about it before reading it).

And here’s an essay he wrote about writing it.