Mark Doty is one of the few poets who is both central to gay poetry as a movement and an important figure in mainstream poetry. I don't mean to suggest that gay poets aren't part of mainstream poetry, but most of them, like John Ashbery or J. D. McClatchy, have not made the issue of their sexuality an important or explicit topic of their work. Even though Source, his latest volume of poetry, makes fewer references than earlier books to AIDS or lovers or participating in gay community events, his work is still very gay; for at heart, Doty is an aesthete, very much derived from the mauve decade of Wilde and Beardsley. Doty's deepest instinct is, in Walter Pater's words, to get “as many pulsations as possible into the given time” he has while alive. Aestheticism is sometimes confused with upper-class snobbery and the acquisition of expensive objects. More frequently it takes on both a democratic and transcendent aspect. Wilde wore not a hothouse gardenia in his buttonhole, but a common sunflower. Whitman, to whom Doty directs an extended letter in Source, was as keen a lover of opera as he was of stevedores. Doty collects beautiful objects, but they are exquisite chards of broken pottery found on the beach, and not Fabergé eggs. And it's not the objects themselves that he values, it's the non-material sensations they produce, the light they reflect and refract, the scents that they emit, the frissons they create as they pass across the skin.

Light especially is the condition that inspires Doty and to which his poems aspire. In his book-length essay on Jan Davidsz de Heem's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, he writes of himself and the other gallery visitors: “We are all moving … in the light that comes toward me through a canvas the size of a school notebook; we are all walking in the light of a wedge of lemon, four oysters, a half-glass of wine, a cluster of green grapes with a few curling leaves still attached to the stem. This light is enough to reveal us as we are, bound together, in the warmth and good light of habitation, in the good and fleshly aliveness of us.” In Source, Dutch still lifes have given way to “Manhattan: Luminism.” The luminist painters were a small 19th-century school of landscape artists who tried to recreate that special American light of the Eastern seaboard, the salt marshes of the Chesapeake, the cranberry bogs of New England, the hazy fields of newly mowed meadow in which objects are, in Doty's words, “edgeless, one bit / of light's indifferent streaming.” The paradoxical result of all this attention to the ineffable, transitory quality of light is the awareness “that there is / something stubborn in us /—does it matter how small it is?—/ that does not diminish.” “Principalities of June” ends with the assertion that with light “the more you break it / the nearer it comes to whole.” Source preaches something akin to the conservation of spiritual energy. Our perception of the momentariness of beauty is the surest sign of the infinity of the imagination and the eternity of the self.

Although the source of all this beauty seems to come from some transcendent natural power—Doty can sometimes sound like a Wordsworthian pantheist—the source of much of his inspiration is other poetry and other art. It doesn't have to be great art. In “Brian Age 7,” Doty is inspired by the crayon self-portrait of a first-grader hanging in the window of the local pharmacy. “It isn't craft,” he admits, “that makes the figure come alive.” Indeed, he has no idea why “some marks / seem to thrill with life, / possess a portion / of the nervous energy / in their maker's hand.” But the right “wobbly crayon strokes” can contain an entire “system of beauty.” Still, great artists are more reliable conduits of this energy.

If Jan Davidsz de Heem's notebook-size painting can inspire the seventy pages of Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Source seems to be channeling the spirit of Marianne Moore, or at least the book has recurring echoes of her most famous poem, “The Steeplejack.” Its opening lines, “Dürer would have seen a reason for living / in a town like this,” finds its echo in the opening of Doty's “Catalina Macaw,” “Dürer painted a wing like this.” “Summer Landscape,” a poem inspired by a Stuart Davis painting, presents a scaffolding ringing “the spire of the Unitarian Universalist / Meeting house,” where a female steeplejack (a steeplejill?) named Jade is “regilding … the acanthus, our spire's / once-golden flourish angling up into summer air” where she “anchors to the sturdy tip a crown.” In Moore's poem, C. J. Poole is “gilding the solid- / pointed star, which on a steeple / stands for hope.” It's not just that the imagery is similar; the cadences bear a great deal of similarity. Moore makes yet another appearance in “Time on Main,” in which Doty meditates on the three “pointless” steeples that rise on Johnson, Vermont's main street. Whereas Moore has C. J. Poole put up a red and white sign that reads “Danger,” Doty has his Congregationalist church hang a sign “above / arched windows inscribed / in marble glass / LOOK UP.”

There are many reasons Doty should elect an affinity with Moore. She is, after all, one of our greatest poets and, if not a lesbian, certainly queer in some sense. She represents the sort of American precision that Doty admires, and like Doty, she uses animals over and over again, not only as objects worthy of study in themselves, but also as objects of autobiographical projection. But they differ significantly. Moore casts on her subjects the steady light of the anatomist who, searching for solidity, discovers ambiguity and danger. Doty casts the edgeless light of the luminist to discover in ambiguity comfort and reconciliation. Moore finds that the “sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave” whereas Doty locates “in the liquid open” the “wild deep current that brought us.” Moore is hard and unaccommodating, whereas Doty—although not soft—hopes to find consolation in the world around him, to be comforted by the experience.

Perhaps because Moore is too crusty, too resistant, too unconsoling, Doty turns to James Wright's “A Blessing” as the inspiration for the title poem. “A Blessing” is one of the masterpieces of post-war poetry. It places Wright in early spring “just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,” where he encounters two Indian ponies playing in a field alone. Doty's “Source” places him outside a New England town where he sees “three horses in a fenced field / by the narrow highway's edge.” One of the many things that must have struck Doty about “A Blessing” is that at first Wright doesn't encounter ponies, it's “Twilight that bounds softly forth of the grass;” as if the light becomes the horses, that light becomes flesh. In Doty, the horses are beamed up: he watches “the accordion bones / of the rust-spotted little one unfolding itself into the afternoon.” And they are not alone in this transmogrification. “You too,” he tells the reader, “you flare / and fall back into the necessary open space.” Wright's poem ends as he caresses the mare's long ear “That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist” with the sudden realization, “That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.” Doty's poem ends with an equally visionary moment in which:

you could see beneath their hooves
the path they'd traveled up, the horse-road
On which they trot into the world, eager for pleasure
and sunlight, and down which they descend,
in good time, into the source of spring.

Wright celebrates the nexus where animals, humans, and flora meet and become interchangeable forms of beauty, creativity, and vitality. Doty's “poem wants a name for the kind of nothing / at the center of time, out of which the foals / come tumbling: curled, fetal, dreaming.” This nothing is “Not emptiness, / not negation, but generous, cold nothing: / the breathing space out of which new shoots / are propelled to the grazing mouths.” This blankness seems strangely like the tabula rasa, the yet unwritten page of poetry, and my suspicion is strengthened by Doty's insistence that “The poem wants the impossible” and that “the poem wants a name.” It is the poem, ultimately, that is the generator of life, that creates the “breathing space” which shoots nourishment into “the grazing mouth.”

If there is a transcendent force in Doty's world, it is the transcendence of art. The skeptical postmodern is supposed to reject the “mystification” that distinguishes commercial representation from art, and separates doggerel from poetry. But Doty again and again returns to that very queer turn-of-the-century belief that art and literature are different from other objects and can bring a kind of salvation, or at least a balm to the spirit. As Pater wrote, “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success and life,” and that the wisest spend their life “in art and song.”