Doty's elegant, often melancholy, verse offers a rare combination of rural and metropolitan images. "I've always been a poet who wrote about urban life because I love the layers and surprises and the jangly complexities of cities. I feel at home in cities, being a gay man. It's a place of permission and possibility. In 1990 I moved to Provincetown. I also love this landscape of salt marshes, beaches and dunes, but I had to write about it in a different way. In the marsh, there is no narrative. All that happens is that a bird flies by, the tide comes in and goes out." His poetry combines elemental natural forces with his own love of drag. "I play around with the distinction between art and nature, the real and the false. My experience often feels pretty seamless. . . I've always been drawn to artifice and the beauties of surface and shadings and tone. A lot of the process of development is figuring out how to be all of yourself in a poem. How do you let your love of wigs and make-up, your sense of humor, your anger find its way into the poem?" Parts of his most recent book, "Atlantis," deal with his partner's slow death from AIDS. "Before Wally's diagnosis, lots of my work had been about memory and trying to gain some perspective on the past. Suddenly that was much less important and I felt pushed to pay attention to now, what I could celebrate or discern in the now. In the light of something like that, what you're doing has to matter. There's no time to fool around." They shove and tumble around us on the concrete floor, the little ones, just as they must have crowded around the gates of this world, eager to live. So much to be licked, on earth, what work! All mouth, sure of their reception, they've hurried to a realm they know will feed them, and they open their new faces to us, tongues and teeth apprehending our sweetness and pity, smells and salts. This is here, the minds register, yes, and this, and this is good. The older ones, in their separate pens, consider what's to be made of betrayal. This one's serenely still, waiting for us to make the first gesture; this, all evident eagerness, muzzle against the grid. The one who's been here longest cries, though not to us And that one, unclaimed, blank placard above her cage, simply sleeps in a far corner, unavailable. Rowed under the hellgate inscriptions (Too big, No time, Moving to another state) they've lost local habitations and, some of them, names, though most carry forward a single word -- Bosco, Laredo, Jack -- all of the past they're allowed to keep, in this vague limbo far from affection's locations and routines. I know. Leashed to no one, the plain daily habits gone, who are we then? Nothing but eagerness, or caution, though only a little; couldn't these various distances dissolve at a touch, or a dozen touches? Not to be forgotten, the blank hours, but put in place. O Dakota and Brandy and Jimbo, just as we wanted to be born once, don't we want to be delivered again, even knowing the nothing love may come to? O Lucky and Buddy and Red, we put our tongues to the world. Mark Doty's "Atlantis" is published by HarperPerennial photograph by Robert Giard 1992