Mark Doty is the author of Firebird, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon and Source.
Original light broke apart, the Gnostics say, when time began,
singular radiance fractioned into form – an easy theory
to believe, in early summer, when that first performance
seems repeated daily. Though wouldn’t it mean each fracturing took us
that much further from heaven? Not in this town,
not in June: harbour and cloudbank, white...
The sign said immunology but I readilluminology: and look,
heaven is a platinum latitude over Fifth, fogged result of sun-brushed
steel, pearl dimensions. Cézanne: ‘We are an iridescent chaos.’
*
Balcony over Lexington, May evening,
fog wreath’d towers, gothic dome lit from within, monument of our aspirations
turned hollow, abandoned
somehow. And later, in the...
Mark Doty specialises in ekphrasis. The word once meant the description of a work of visual art within a poem, but has come to mean poetic description more generally. Sometimes Doty describes a...
The words ‘HIV Positive’ and ‘Aids’ do not appear in the poems in Mark Doty’s My Alexandria (1995); instead, they hover in the spaces between the other words, and...
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