Mark Doty
1. Faith
“I’ve been having these Awful dreams, each a little different, Though the core’s the same- We’re walking in a field, Wally and Arden and I, a stretch of grass With a highway running beside
Favrile
Glassmakers, At century’s end, Compounded metallic lusters In reference To natural sheens (dragonfly And beetle wings, Marbled light on kerosene) And invented names As coolly lustrous As their products’ Scarab-gleam: Quetzal, Aurene, Favrile. Suggesting,
The Embrace
You weren’t well or really ill yet either; Just a little tired, your handsomeness Tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought To your face a thoughtful, deepening grace. I didn’t for a moment doubt
Metro North
Over the terminal, the arms and chest of the god Brightened by snow. Formerly mercury, formerly silver, Surface yellowed by atmospheric sulphurs acid exhalations, And now the shining thing’s descendant. Obscure passages, Dim apertures:
Broadway
Under Grand Central’s tattered vault maybe half a dozen electric stars still lit One saxophone blew, and a sheer black scrim Billowed over some minor constellation Under repair. Then, on Broadway, red wings In
Dickeyville Grotto
The priest never used blueprints, but worked all The many designs out of his head. Father Wilerus, Transplanted Alsatian, Built around This plain Wisconsin Redbrick church A coral-reef en- Crustation meant, The brochure says,
A Display Of Mackeral
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,
Demolition
The intact facade’s now almost black In the rain; all day they’ve torn at the back Of the building, “the oldest concrete structure In New England,” the newspaper said. By afternoon, When the backhoe
Long Point Light
Long Pont’s apparitional This warm spring morning, The strand a blur of sandy light, And the square white Of the lighthouse-separated from us By the bay’s ultramarine As if it were nowhere We could
To Bessie Drennan
Because she could find no one else to paint a picture of the old family place where she and her sisters lived. . .she attended an adult education class in Montpelier. In one evening
A Green Crab's Shell
Not, exactly, green: Closer to bronze Preserved in kind brine, Something retrieved From a Greco-Roman wreck, Patinated and oddly Muscular. We cannot Know what his fantastic Legs were like Though evidence Suggests eight Complexly
The Ancient World
Today the Masons are auctioning Their discarded pomp: a trunk of turbans, Gemmed and ostrich-plumed, and operetta costumes Labeled inside the collar “Potentate” And “Vizier.” Here their chairs, blazoned With the Masons’ sign, huddled
At the Gym
This salt-stain spot Marks the place where men Lay down their heads, Back to the bench, And hoist nothing That need be lifted But some burden they’ve chosen This time: more reps, More weight,
Description
My salt marsh -mine, I call it, because These day-hammered fields Of dazzled horizontals Undulate, summers, Inside me and out- How can I say what it is? Sea lavender shivers Over the tidewater steel.
Visitation
When I heard he had entered the harbor, And circled the wharf for days, I expected the worst: shallow water, Confusion, some accident to bring The young humpback to grief. Don’t they depend on
Turtle, Swan
Because the road to our house Is a back road, meadowlands punctuated By gravel quarry and lumberyard, There are unexpected travelers Some nights on our way home from work. Once, on the lawn of