monday poem #104: Mark Doty, "In the Same Space"
Over WisCon weekend, I picked up quite a bit of poetry-mostly new books by authors I've already read.
I'm not sure what to say about Mark Doty's new book. I don't like it as much as My Alexandria or even Sweet Machine, but I'm not sure whether that's because it's actually a lesser book or because Doty's inclinations and my tastes have been diverging fairly steadily since shortly after I first encountered his work.
At any rate there are still several poems here that I do like very much, particularly "Heaven For Paul," "Heaven for Beau," and this one.
In the Same Space
The sun set early in the Square, winter afternoons,
angling over the apartments to the west, so that light would bisect
the northern row of dark houses diagonally, the grand houses
that were suddenly not of the last century but of the century before.
Then the world would seem equally divided, awhile, between the golden
and the chill, equipoise in a bitter year. When the sun was completely gone,
we'd turn for home, the dogs and I, and to the south, the two towers,
harshly formal by day, brusque in their authority-
at the beginning of evening they'd go a blue a little darker than the sky,
lit from top to bottom by a wavering curtain of small, welcoming lamps.
- Mark Doty
from School of the Arts
I'm not sure what to say about Mark Doty's new book. I don't like it as much as My Alexandria or even Sweet Machine, but I'm not sure whether that's because it's actually a lesser book or because Doty's inclinations and my tastes have been diverging fairly steadily since shortly after I first encountered his work.
At any rate there are still several poems here that I do like very much, particularly "Heaven For Paul," "Heaven for Beau," and this one.
In the Same Space
The sun set early in the Square, winter afternoons,
angling over the apartments to the west, so that light would bisect
the northern row of dark houses diagonally, the grand houses
that were suddenly not of the last century but of the century before.
Then the world would seem equally divided, awhile, between the golden
and the chill, equipoise in a bitter year. When the sun was completely gone,
we'd turn for home, the dogs and I, and to the south, the two towers,
harshly formal by day, brusque in their authority-
at the beginning of evening they'd go a blue a little darker than the sky,
lit from top to bottom by a wavering curtain of small, welcoming lamps.
- Mark Doty
from School of the Arts