“The Owner of the Night" by Mark Doty

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 8, 2017   The Owner of the Night   Mark Doty

interrogates whoever walks this shadow-lane, this hour not reserved for you: who   are you to enter it? Orion's head over heels above the road, jewel-belt   flinting starlight to fuel two eyes looking down from the air:   beacons in reverse, since light pours in toward her appetite   until she wings her noiseless outline between our rooftop and the stars, over this door and all the doors   hidden in the grass: dreaming voles,   firefly province,   wasps in the palace they've hollowed under the hill.   Mole resting his face against his splayed hands.   Perch, blink. Pose the evening's question to the sleepless   while the moon if there is one scatters islands on a field of ink. Who   maps this? The owner of the night looks down to mirror and admit the hours   before the upper vaults begin to lighten and recede. Did you hear what I said,   a face looks down from the night? Did who hear me? Who reads this page, who writes it?            Copyright © 2017 Mark Doty. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I spend about half my time in the city, in a built landscape where one knows the name of just about everything; in this way it's a city of language, a world mediated by words. The rest of the time I live in a place where sky and weather, plants and animals are as present as sidewalks and vehicles are in town. My inner process of narrating experience in words slows down there, even vanishes for moments at a time; then I'm just raking, or weeding, or looking at the sky not supplying words for what I see. Thus it's startling, at twilight, or deep in the night, when the dark itself seems to say a word: who. It seems the right question, the one the owl asks; as Stevens said of the harbor lights in Key West, that sound arranges, deepens, and enchants the night." —Mark Doty   Mark Doty is the author of Deep Lane (W.W. Norton, 2015). He teaches at Rutgers University and splits his time between New York City and the east end of Long Island.   Photo credit: Star Black Poetry by Doty   Deep Lane (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015) "The Night Ship" by Timothy Donnelly "Flying at Night" by Ted Kooser "At Night" by Yone Noguchi Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. If you enjoy Poem-a-Day, please consider making a donation to help make it possible. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038