Quotes from Mark Doty

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?

Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.

Desire can make anything into a god.

Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours.

And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finally—that what we want is to be brought into relationship, to be inside, within. Perhaps it's true that nothing matters more to us than that.

And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

Here and gone. That's what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?

The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.

I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing...

It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.

This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging and breaking down. Bodies as tulips bent to the demands of light, colored into blossom, spent.

And something else, of course; there's always more, deep in art's pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest: everything here has been transformed into feeling, as if by looking very hard at an object it suddenly comes that much closer to some realm where it isn't a thing at all but something just on the edge of dissolving. Into what? Tears, gladness—you've felt like this before, haven't you? Taken far inside.

in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love. In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center: there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure.

Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.

Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me

All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.