The morning’s the size of heaven. What will you do with it?

Here is the world you asked for,
        gorgeous and opportune,

here is nine o’clock, harbor wide,
       and a glinting code: promise and warning
             The morning’s the size of heaven.

What will you do with it?

—Mark Doty, from “Long Point Light” in Atlantis: Poems

Mark Doty, 59, is an American poet and memoirist, and the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.  Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee, earned his Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont.  Doty has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton, Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, Cornell, University of Houston and NYU.  He is currently Distinguished Professor and Writer in Residence in the Department of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he directs Writers House.

His third book, “My Alexandria” (University of Illinois Press, 1993), is entirely informed by the AIDS epidemic. In 1989, Doty’s partner Wally Roberts tested positive for HIV. The collection, written while Roberts had not yet become ill, contemplates the prospect of mortality, desperately attempting to find some way of making the prospect of loss even momentarily bearable. “My Alexandria” was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Philip Levine, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. When the book was published in the U.K. by Jonathan Cape, Doty became the first American poet to win the T.S. Eliot Prize, Britain’s most significant annual award for poetry. (Source: Wiki)

Find his books @ Amazon: My Alexandria and Atlantis: Poems

Credits: Poem Source – yama-bato; Mark Doty Portrait: Aestheticamagazine.com