All Poems
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Dickeyville Grotto
© Mark Doty
Father Wilerus,
transplanted Alsatian,
built around
this plain Wisconsin
To Bessie Drennan
© Mark Doty
Bessie, you've made space dizzy
with your perfected technique for snow:
white spatters and a dry brush
feathering everything in the world
As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter, I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor
© James Wright
And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?
Long Point Light
© Mark Doty
Long Pont's apparitional
this warm spring morning,
the strand a blur of sandy light,
On A Fan
© Henry Austin Dobson
Where are the secrets it knew?
Weavings of plot and of plan?
But where is the Pompadour, too?
This was the Pompadours Fan!
Visitation
© Mark Doty
When I heard he had entered the harbor,
and circled the wharf for days,
I expected the worst: shallow water,
Heaven And Hell
© Francis Thompson
'Tis said there were no thought of hell,
Save hell were taught; that there should be
Burning Leaves, November
© Christopher Morley
THESE are the folios of April,
All the library of spring,
Missals gilt and rubricated
With the frost's illumining.
The Ancient World
© Mark Doty
Today the Masons are auctioning
their discarded pomp: a trunk of turbans,
gemmed and ostrich-plumed, and operetta costumes
labeled inside the collar "Potentate"
Demolition
© Mark Doty
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 claw appears above
three stories of columns and cornices,
The Clown Chastised
© Stéphane Mallarme
Eyes, lakes of my simple passion to be reborn
Other than as the actor who gestures with his hand
As with a pen, and evokes the foul soot of the lamps,
Heres a window in the walls of cloth Ive torn.
Turtle, Swan
© Mark Doty
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 the Tool
To The Recluse, Wei Pa
© Du Fu
Often in this life of ours we resemble, in our failure to meet, the Shen and
Shang constellations, one of which rises as the other one sets. What lucky
chance is it, then, that brings us together this evening under the light of
this same lamp? Youth and vigor last but a little time. -- Each of us now has
