A Green Crab's Shell
by Mark Doty
Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like-- though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws' gesture of menace and power. A gull's gobbled the center, leaving this chamber --size of a demitasse-- open to reveal a shocking, Giotto blue. Though it smells of seaweed and ruin, this little traveling case comes with such lavish lining! Imagine breathing surrounded by the brilliant rinse of summer's firmament. What color is the underside of skin? Not so bad, to die, if we could be opened into this-- if the smallest chambers of ourselves, similarly, revealed some sky. Mark Doty has written a wonderful poem called “A Green Crab’s Shell.” It’s about finding a crab shell and wondering at the beautiful shock of “Giotto blue” found within it — the color of the sky, carried by the crab all lifelong and yet invisible to all. It took the crab’s death, probably at the beak of some hungry seagull, to reveal this lovely, hidden color.  I like Doty's straightforward, almost stream-of-consciousness style - he shows stylistic tricks in favor of saying what he has to say, but his Language is precise and exquisite for all that, and his poems thoughtful and Revealing. Today's is a good example - the crab shell is described in Beautiful detail, with an engaged subjectivity that reinforces its Comparison to a work of art, and the segue into a more personal musing feels perfectly Natural. And I love the ending, with its suggestion of an Escher an Worlds-within-worlds landscape - indeed, it was that image that made me Pick this poem out of a collection of Doty's works to run here.

At the Gym
This salt-stain spot marks the place where men lay down their heads, back to the bench, and hoist nothing that need be lifted but some burden they've chosen this time: more reps, more weight, the upward shove of it leaving, collectively, this sign of where we've been: shroud-stain, negative flashed onto the vinyl where we push something unyielding skyward, gaining some power at least over flesh, which goads with desire, and terrifies with frailty. Who could say who's added his heat to the nimbus of our intent, here where we make ourselves: something difficult lifted, pressed or curled, Power over beauty, power over power! Though there's something more tender, beneath our vanity, our will to become objects of desire: we sweat the mark of our presence onto the cloth. Here is some halo the living made together. In the poem “At the Gym” by Mark Doty we are given a visualization of a person at the gym about to lift weights. This poem has various different meanings. It’s a poem with a bit confusion about whom he wants to tell what .One thing that Doty is trying to say through this poem is that what impact we leave on society any why. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be remembered or leaving a legacy behind but it is what we are actually leaving that Doty is touching on. He used the word “stain” twice to describe what we have left and will leave, “stain”, a word commonly having a negative connotation to it. We want to leave an impression, but are only leaving behind stains. In the last two lines of the poem, Doty calls the stains “some halo the living made together” A halo, compared to stains, has a pretty positive connotation to it, as if we have reached sainthood. This is what we hope to reach, this is what we hope to leave behind, but it is that bench of false hope we rely on to do so. Doty is asking us to live a life worth living and do things that need to be done, then, and only then will you actually leave behind a legacy worth remembering, one with noble intent. In a very deep meaning the poet has tried telling giving a deeper meaning for what we human beings always want and try to do.

The Embrace

You weren't well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.

I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out—at work maybe?—
having a good day, almost energetic.

We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative

by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?

So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of you—warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.

Bless you. You came back so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.

The Embrace is what love symbolizes- the idea of loss not controlling you, but letting your love take control over your loss. This poem speaks of the gratitude of the surviving lover that he has a chance to say goodbye (albeit in a dream) to the person he loved without reliving the grief of his dying, seeing his partner as he was before the trauma and changes wrecked by illness. (Especially the stresses and wasting that tends to be wrought by AIDS.). I personally wonder if many people have had such a dream as this. The certainty that this was only a dream and yet the eagerness to participate it. To experience it and remember it all, to record it knowing this would be the only contact you might ever have with this loved one.The utter peace of leaning your head on the shoulder of the lost love, the familiar shoulder that you know in your mind is no longer of this earth. But in your heart it is as solid as it ever was. One last chance to experience the whole, entire person. The Embrace is one of the best poem written by mark Doty

Culture and Social background

For a start, there were Doty's parents' almost yearly moves from one part of the country to another, common to so many corporate and military families of the era. Doty's father was an Army engineer who had to go where the work was, whether that meant building nuclear missile silos outside Tucson or rocket launching pads at Cape Canaveral.By the time Doty reached his teens, she had entered the ''long tornadic tunnel'' of alcoholism that would eventually kill her -- but not before she had inflicted some grave psychic damage on her son.Mark doty worked as a temporary office worker.After the death of his partner wally who tested HIV positive Mark Doty was in a shock and was the central event in Doty’s young life as both a person and poet. On its publication in 1987, Booklist praised the “quiet, intimate” Turtle, Swan for turning the gay experience into “an example of how we live, how we suffer and transcend suffering.”Through his different books Doty has often tried to say about the pain he suffered due to his identity. Doty’s status as detached observer to his own work was significantly complicated by his next volume, My Alexandria (1993), which won the National Poetry Series contest. Here, Doty confronts the pain of life as seen through the prism of AIDS. after Wally’s death, Doty found himself unable to write or even read. The solicitation of a poem by a friend who was editing an anthology led him to the writing, not of a poem, but of a book-length memoir, Heaven’s Coast (1996), in which he came to grips, in prose, with Wally’s life and death. “It was a real gift to be able to write it” at that troubled moment, Doty told Bing. A sense of loss pervades the volume, and death—in one form or another—is present in nearly every poem.  However, poems such as “Becoming a Meadow,” “Brilliance,” and “Fog,” in which Doty chronicles his and Roberts's fateful tests for HIV, Doty draws as much attention to the joys of life as the sadness of its parting. 

Mark Doty

Mark Doty-Poet

Born on 10  August 1953,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. He

 has described himself as having been “a sissy”; frightened by his emerging 

sexual identity, he married hastily at age eighteen 1989. His partner Wally

Roberts tested positive for HIV, which drastically changed Doty's writing.

 Roberts's death in 1994 inspired Doty to write Atlantis. Heaven's Coast: A 

Memoir also deals with this subject and received the PEN/Martha Albrand 

Award for First Nonfiction. In 1995, he was the first American poet to win the 

£10,000 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, for his book My Alexandria. The book was 

also a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the 1993 Los 

Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle

 Award. Doty also received a 1994 Whiting Writers' Award. He has written 

twelve books of poetry and three memoirs. He lives in New York City and

 Fire Island, New York. He was the John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the 

graduate program at

 The University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He has also

 participated in The Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of 

Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers and was on the 

faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in August 2006. He is the 

inaugural judge of the White Crane/James White Poetry Prize for Excellence 

in Gay Men's Poetry.

Doty is a judge for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize.

He now teaches at Rutgers University. His husband since 1995 is the writer Paul Lisicky.