The poet Mark Doty discovered an old mirror in Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel. The heavy glass and its aging silver weren't reflecting very well, anymore, "This mirror resists what it can, too weary for generosity. As if each coming and going, each visitor turned, one night or weeks, to check a collar or the angle of a hat, left some residue, a bit of leave-taking preserved in mercury. And now, filled up with all that regard, there is hardly any room for regarding, and a silvered fog fills nearly all - the space, like rain: the city's lovely, crowded dream, which closes you into itself like a folding screen."
Mark Doty, to many the poetic chronicler of the AIDS plague, turns his glass outward in a new collection, called "Source."
