Mark Doty

The sign said immunology but I readilluminology: and look,

heaven is a platinum latitude over Fifth, fogged result of sun-brushed

steel, pearl dimensions. Cézanne: ‘We are an iridescent chaos.’

*

Balcony over Lexington, May evening,

fog wreath’d towers, gothic dome lit from within, monument of our aspirations

turned hollow, abandoned

somehow. And later, in the...

Original light broke apart, the Gnostics say, when time began,

singular radiance fractioned into form – an easy theory

to believe, in early summer, when that first performance

seems repeated daily. Though wouldn’t it mean each fracturing took us

that much further from heaven? Not in this town,

not in June: harbour and cloudbank, white...

Big blocks of ice – clear cornerstones – chug down a turning belt

toward the blades of a wicked, spinning fan; rotary din of a thousand skates and then

powder flies out in a roaring firehose spray of diamond dust, and the film crew obscures

the well-used Manhattan snow with a replica of snow.

*

Trailers along the edge of the Square, arc lamps, the tangled cables of a technical...

The flight attendant said:

We have a mechanical problem with the plane, and we have contacted the FAA for advice,

and then: We will be making an emergency landing in Detroit,

and then: We will be landing at an Air Force base in Dayton,because there is a long runway there, and because there will be a lot of help on the ground.

Her voice broke slightly on the word help, and she switched off the...

Helen says heaven, for her, would be complete immersion in physical process, without self-consciousness –

to be the respiration of the grass, or ionised agitation just above the break of a wave, traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms.

Images of exchange, and of untrammelled nature. But if we’re to become part of it all, won’t our paradise also involve

...