Mark Doty

Thirty-seven clocks in five tiers.

Sunset, end of a mild afternoon the hand of winter’s never quite let go of.

Mantel, cuckoo, rusticated, ormolu, glass-domed, moving brass balls and chimes, porcelain, French clocks with bronze figures, thirty-seven, ranged in the shop window, not especially attractive,

none fine, none precious, even to my taste individually desirable, but studying...

I love starting things

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Fat and shadow, oil and wax, mobility solidified, like cooled grease in a can –

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Seeing how far I can go

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      Analiese said, happily, ‘He paints the ugliness of flesh,’       but that isn’t it: flesh without the overlayer, how we ought to see it, all we’re taught –

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Helen says heaven, for her, would be complete immersion in physical process, without self-consciousness –

to be the respiration of the grass, or ionised agitation just above the break of a wave, traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms.

Images of exchange, and of untrammelled nature. But if we’re to become part of it all, won’t our paradise also involve

...

The flight attendant said:

We have a mechanical problem with the plane, and we have contacted the FAA for advice,

and then: We will be making an emergency landing in Detroit,

and then: We will be landing at an Air Force base in Dayton,because there is a long runway there, and because there will be a lot of help on the ground.

Her voice broke slightly on the word help, and she switched off the...

Big blocks of ice – clear cornerstones – chug down a turning belt

toward the blades of a wicked, spinning fan; rotary din of a thousand skates and then

powder flies out in a roaring firehose spray of diamond dust, and the film crew obscures

the well-used Manhattan snow with a replica of snow.

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Trailers along the edge of the Square, arc lamps, the tangled cables of a technical...