A sharp cracking cold day, the air of the Upper East Side full of rising plumes of smoke from furnaces and steaming laundries, exhaust from the tailpipes of idling taxis, flapping banners, gangs of pigeons. Here on the museum steps a flock suddenly chooses to take flight. I have a backache, I'm weary, and it couldn't matter less, for this whole scene - the crowd and hustle on the museum steps, which seem alive all day with commerce and hurry, with gatherings and departures - is suffused for me with a warmth, because I have fallen in love with a painting.

So begins Mark Doty's latest book of nonfiction, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, new from Beacon Press. Not exactly an essay (too long), not exactly a memoir (not long enough), the book is an extended meditation on painting, the nature of representation, memory and life.

Like Doty's poems, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon is characterized by his exquisite eye for detail. "We are all moving, just now, in the light that has come toward me through a canvas the dize of a school notebook; we are all walking in the light of a wedge of lemon, four oysters, a half-glass of wine, a cluster of green grapes with a few curling leaves still attached to their stem." Later he describes each element more: the way the lemon curl peels in the glass, the "[s]himmery, barely solid bodies of oysters, shucked in order to allow their flesh to receive every ministration of light."

Still life paintings seem simple, but make profound assertions, he says. "That there can never be too much of reality; that the attempt to draw nearer to it-which will fail-will not fail entirely, as it will give us not the fact of lemons and oysters but this, which is its own fact, its own brave assay towards what is."

Dutch paintings, particularly Jan Davidsz de Heem's "Still Life with Oysters and Lemon," receive here the focus of Doty's lens. So, too, do the wealth of objects he remembers emerging from his grandmother's purse in the 1950s. "And here are all the beautiful contents of my Mamaw's purse, each laid out, barely touching the other, each made poignant with distance and time. Here in the center, in a footed silver dish brought back by one of my aunts who was a

missionary in Korea, a sparkling dragon circling its rim, the peppermints anchor and glow, sparkling in their little skins of cellophane."

The peppermints were a constant in his grandmother's hands, but they made a permanent impression the day Doty's family went to see the bears. The family trekked into Tennessee to see the bears, black shapes emerging from black forest, and they were not disappointed. Mamaw even offered them peppermints, leaving a line of the candies on the stone wall by the edge of the field where they appeared.

When I had the pleasure of hearing Doty lecture at the Bennington Writing Seminars in 1998, he read us one of his favorite poems, Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose." (Geography III is, he said, one of the books which accompanies him everywhere.) The bear episode he describes in Still Life with Oysters and Lemon is the same kind of encounter with the other, with something numinous, that Bishop describes in her verse.