Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading. — Mark Doty Broken Copy Share Image
Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah,… — Mark Doty Animal Copy Share Image
“I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t know… — Mark Doty Aids Copy Share Image
“One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They… — Mark Doty Beauty Copy Share Image
Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that… — Mark Doty Business Copy Share Image
“(I know, lacquer and tumble and glow , burnished and fired and hazed ) it’s because what else Lord to wear? Every… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love. In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person.… — Mark Doty Being in love Copy Share Image
The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just… — Mark Doty Concrete Copy Share Image
Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold… — Mark Doty Attention Copy Share Image
“I’d write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a… — Mark Doty Caretaking Copy Share Image
The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing,… — Mark Doty Aftermath Copy Share Image
“After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on… — Mark Doty Aids Copy Share Image
And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath. — Mark Doty Body Copy Share Image
Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the… — Mark Doty Brightness Copy Share Image
“The state of mind above which my distraction floats like fog is suddenly perfectly clear, though the right word for it is… — Mark Doty Death Copy Share Image
...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and… — Mark Doty Agency Copy Share Image
“…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been… — Mark Doty Art Copy Share Image
“I don’t know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or… — Mark Doty Death Copy Share Image
“…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death… — Mark Doty Contradiction Copy Share Image
We learn to treasure words that people call us; we learn to live by words that hurt. We cannot toss them aside,… — Mark Doty Dignity Copy Share Image
There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem. — Mark Doty Consent Copy Share Image
Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss… — Mark Doty Assertion Copy Share Image
