Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know. Mark Doty More Quotes by Mark Doty More Quotes From Mark Doty Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love. Mark Doty being-in-love grief heart 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. Mark Doty darkness stories looks We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear. Mark Doty disappear individuality long Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it. Mark Doty gateways world thinking 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. Mark Doty ties names thinking 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. Mark Doty distance would-be reality Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your heart. So I think we’d better look at what grief might offer us. It’s like what Rilke says about self-doubt: it is not going to go away, and therefore you need to think about how it might become your ally. Mark Doty grief heart thinking There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem. Mark Doty hours made world 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. Mark Doty silence ambition mean The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost. Mark Doty grief knowing heart 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 Mark Doty eggs animal two It's unsettling, to lose the safety of the familiar, even when what's disrupted is an ordinary routine. When I began this poem, I was grieving for the loss of my old barbershop in Manhattan, and wondering at the strangeness of my new one. I didn't have any idea the poem would break into the underworld, opening a deeper subject: the continuing force of the old griefs routine helps to mediate, and my strange, sheer wonder at my own survival. Where's home now? In the contingent present, in which anything can disappear, and where we're sometimes granted some form of grace. Mark Doty grief loss home All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes. Mark Doty diminish We love disasters that have nothing to do with us Mark Doty disaster 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. Mark Doty light house moving To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though the human being holds most of the cards. Mark Doty agreement dog long What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing? Mark Doty joy thinking Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading. Mark Doty paradise broken reading 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 kissing gone ease 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. Mark Doty heroism achievement accomplishment
